Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

Henry Wiencek

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct 16, 2012 - History - 352 pages

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?

What people are saying

Review: Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

User Review  - Drusha - Goodreads

I will write a more full review later. Suffice it to say, AT LAST...a book about Thomas Jefferson that has been deeply researched and offers a truer picture of Jefferson than previous books. Fascinating!

Review: Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

User Review  - Micah - Goodreads

The worst part of this book is how Wiencek tries to paint Jefferson's contemporaries as abolitionists in any way. That, and the idea that Jefferson was the first to think of slaves as a means of ...

About the author

Henry Wiencek, a nationally prominent historian and writer, is the author of several books, including The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999, and An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (FSG, 2003). He lives with his wife and son in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
• Author: Henry Wiencek
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012
• ISBN: 0374299560, 9780374299569
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State; History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775); History / United States / Revolutionary Period (1775-1800); Social Science / Slavery