5. The President’s Plantation
Thomas Jefferson owned over 600 chattel slaves during his life. About 400 of them lived and worked in Monticello, and in any given year around 130 toiled on the plantation. He constantly monitored his human property to extract the maximum labor out of them and strove to increase their numbers through procreation – sometimes with his own personal participation. As he put it: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years … an addition to the capital”. Many details of the lives of the hundreds enslaved at Monticello are lost to history. Slaves were denied access to education and literacy – to teach a slave to read and write was criminalized. So they seldom wrote down their experiences, and the era’s educated people seldom bothered to record the lives of slaves.
Jefferson owned 5000 acres, around eight square miles, near Charlottesville in central Virginia. He divided the property into separate farms for ease of management. The main one where he lived was a mountaintop plantation, Monticello, whose name means “little mountain” in Italian. Jefferson further divided each farm into “quarter farms”, run by an overseer and an allotment of slaves placed under his command. He further sought to divide the farms and split them into agricultural fields of forty acres each. Jefferson rode around his property on horseback every day to inspect the land and the human-chattel upon whose toil his solvency rested, a routine he maintained until his death at age 83.
