29. Thomas Jefferson Paid Close Attention to the Operation of His Plantation
Throughout his life, Jefferson owned over 600 slaves. Over 400 of them lived and worked in Monticello, and in any given year around 130 toiled in slavery 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“. Although hundreds were enslaved at Monticello, many details of their lives are lost to history. Slaves were denied access to education and literacy – to teach a slave to read and write was criminalized – and contemporary white historians seldom recorded their lives.
Jefferson owned 5,000 acres, around eight square miles, near Charlottesville, in central Virginia, which he divided 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. Until his death at age 83, Jefferson rode around his property on horseback every day to inspect the land and the slaves upon whose toil his solvency rested.