Henry Wiencek in his 2012 well-researched and highly readable book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, tears this well-kept quasi-sacred image of Jefferson apart once and for all. It is a book on American history that, as one reviewer urged, every American should read.
Jefferson was no minor southern slave-owner. During his lifetime, he was the owner of over 600 human beings on his several tobacco and wheat-raising plantations, buying slaves as investments and selling them off when he needed liquidity. Jefferson kept his own hands clean of administering punishment to laggard or refractory slaves. In a show of gentlemanly paternalism, he might reward a few favored slaves with gratuities; he occasionally forgave some who ran away. Yet, he employed an overseer notorious in the neighborhood for his brutality, and this man of the Enlightenment was fine with having the sub-teen boys laboring in his Monticello nail manufactory whipped to keep production up and profits at the high level he thought reasonable to support his extravagant lifestyle.
Regardless of his accomplishments and his evident sympathies for the (white) yeoman farmers, Jefferson was a life-long ideological racist. He held strong views about the natural inferiority of humans with dark skin color at a time when fellow slave-owner George Washington and some other Founding Fathers north and south had concluded otherwise. Some whom Jefferson held in bondage were his own progeny. Widely rumored in his own lifetime, Jefferson had a slave concubine Sally Hemings, who, in the sick sexual environment of the slave South, was also the half-sister of his dead wife, Martha, whose father had kept a slave concubine on his own Virginia plantation. By Hemings, Jefferson had five or more children, one of whom visitors noted looked remarkably like himself.
Jefferson was adept at talking the talk about slavery being an unfortunate condition -- although he generally meant "unfortunate" for the whites who owned them -- but he never could walk the walk to do anything about it. While in France during the 1780s as the new nation's first ambassador and attending soirees with admiring French philosophes who wanted to hear all about the new egalitarian republican society -- and some of whom had formed a society for promoting abolition, Société des amis des Noirs -- Jefferson dissembled. He maintained that emancipation of the slaves in Virginia was only a matter of time and suggested that he himself was one of its behind-the-scenes advocates.
Back home in the U.S., he made the same kind of encouraging responses to American anti-slavery advocates who wrote him appealing to his vanity as the author of the immortal phrases about all men being created equal and soliciting his support. As Wienick shows, at the very same time while he was issuing those disingenuous statements, he was calculating new ways to extract money from slave labor -- which he took as indispensable to his own and his family's present and future happiness.
Jefferson's attitude towards blacks have often been defended as the flaws of a man of his times. Yet, some other Southern slave owners of the revolutionary generation, including George Washington, were troubled by the blatant contradiction with professed revolutionary values and emancipated all of their slaves. Jefferson freed only a handful. Never once did Jefferson in the powerful political offices he held at the state and national level seize an opportunity to slow down or bring an end to slavery. Indeed, with the presidential Louisiana Purchase of 1803, he opened a vast new territory to slavery's expansion which put into motion the forces that would ultimately tear the nation apart.
taken from here (recommend a look)
Also recommended an article here on 'Black Women Speak To The Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Racial Discrimination' (CERD).
There's still a long way to go in terms of those who feel they are more equal than others.
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