4. The President and His System to Introduce Children to a Life of Slavery
America’s third president was usually meticulous in what he did, and that meticulousness extended to how he brought up and accustomed the children he owned to the lives of bondage that awaited them. He detailed his strategy for child labor in his Farm Book. A firm believer in the need to maximize the returns on his investment in human property, Jefferson wanted to get the most work possible out of his slaves and to start them on their labors as early as practicable. In their earliest years, Jefferson put the tots to work as babysitters and nurses. When girls reached sixteen, they began to spin yarn and weave clothes, while boys from ages ten to sixteen made nails.
Jefferson also put his child slaves (both male and female) to work in the tobacco fields: children had the right height to reach and kill tobacco worms. Eventually, Monticello shifted from tobacco to wheat, which called for less manual labor. So he had the children taught trades as an alternative to field toil. As he put it, his slave children must “go into the ground or learn trades”. Not one to miss a trick, Jefferson used food as an incentive to make the children work harder: if they did a good job, they got more food. If they were particularly diligent, they might also get new clothes.
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