Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

By Henry Wiencek

Book Overview

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain , Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money. So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek's Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the "silent profits" gained from his slaves and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he'd vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson's grocery bills. Parents are divided from children in his ledgers they are recast as money while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call "a vile commerce." Many people of Jefferson's time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story? "

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374299560
• ISBN13: 9780374299569
• Release Date: October 2012
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.4" x 1.2" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

Full of Information, Well-Written, Unique

I really liked the pacing of the book. The obvious question now-a-days is all around Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson's relationship, but Wiencek does not jump right into that. He sets up Jefferson's homelife, his career, his time abroad, and much more in order for you to understand his choices and the dichotomy that is Jefferson and slavery. The title, "Master of the Mountain," is an apt approach. Read this if you're interested in Monticello, it's layout, the Jefferson family as a whole, their slaves, and their ways of approaching slavery at a tumultuous time in American History.