From Ahmet in Tunisia: "" That it was harsh is beyond question. Jefferson’s many apologists have
long contended that he was a kind master, but “the Monticello machine operated
on carefully calculated violence.” Jefferson fastidiously kept his own hands
clean, but he said that some people “require a vigour of discipline to make them
do reasonable work,” and he hired overseers, “hardhanded men who got things done
and had no misgivings,” to carry out that discipline. In the 1950s the editor of
a published edition of Jefferson’s “Farm Book” suppressed evidence that some
children on the place, “the small ones,” were being whipped to keep them at
their tasks, an “omission [that] was important in shaping the scholarly
consensus that Jefferson managed his plantations with a lenient hand.”
Jefferson whined constantly about “the kind of labor we have” on his
holdings, but “we simply cannot believe Jefferson’s complaints about his slaves,
which fit into his pattern of shifting blame to others for his own mistakes.”
Among the most important of these were the debts he constantly ran up to satisfy
his extravagant tastes: for fine French wine, a grand carriage with strutting
horses and of course Monticello itself, a hole down which an endless supply of
money, much of it borrowed, was poured. “The consensus must be turned around,”
Wiencek writes: “With Jefferson miring himself in debt, his slaves kept him afloat.”
"
