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Thomas Jefferson And Slavery
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 slaves during his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, and five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his slave (and sister-in-law) Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. After his death, the rest of the slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts. Privately, one of Jefferson's reasons for not freeing more slaves was his considerable debt,Sloan offset (1995), ''Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt'', p. 14 while his more public justification, expressed in his book ''Notes on the State of Virginia'', was his fear that freeing enslaved people into American society would cause civil unrest between white people and formerly enslaved people. Jefferson consistently spoke out against the international slave trade and outlawed it while he was president. He a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was previously the nation's second vice president of the United States, vice president under John Adams and the first United States Secretary of State, United States secretary of state under George Washington. The principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating Thirteen Colonies, American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation. He produced formative documents and decisions at state, national, and international levels. During the American Revolution, Jefferson represented Virginia in the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence. As ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monticello
Monticello ( ) was the primary plantation of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 26. Located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, in the Piedmont region, the plantation was originally , with Jefferson using the labor of enslaved Africans for extensive cultivation of tobacco and mixed crops, later shifting from tobacco cultivation to wheat in response to changing markets. Due to its architectural and historic significance, the property has been designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1987, Monticello and the nearby University of Virginia, also designed by Jefferson, were together designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The current nickel, a United States coin, features a depiction of Monticello on its reverse side. Jefferson designed the main house using neoclassical design principles described by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio and rew ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First Continental Congress
The First Continental Congress was a meeting of delegates from 12 of the 13 British colonies that became the United States. It met from September 5 to October 26, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after the British Navy instituted a blockade of Boston Harbor and Parliament passed the punitive Intolerable Acts in response to the December 1773 Boston Tea Party. During the opening weeks of the Congress, the delegates conducted a spirited discussion about how the colonies could collectively respond to the British government's coercive actions, and they worked to make a common cause. As a prelude to its decisions, the Congress's first action was the adoption of the Suffolk Resolves, a measure drawn up by several counties in Massachusetts that included a declaration of grievances, called for a trade boycott of British goods, and urged each colony to set up and train its own militia. A less radical plan was then proposed to create a Union of Great Britain an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Summary View Of The Rights Of British America
''A Summary View of the Rights of British America'' was a tract written by Thomas Jefferson in 1774, before the U.S. Declaration of Independence, in which he laid out for delegates to the First Continental Congress a set of grievances against King George III, especially against the King's and Parliament's response to the Boston Tea Party. Jefferson declares that the British Parliament did not have the right to govern the Thirteen Colonies. He argues that since the individual colonies were founded they were independent of British rule. Jefferson, in this work, held that allodial title, not feudal title, was held to American lands, and thus the people did not owe fees and rents for that land to the British crown. Despite being a life-long slave owner, Jefferson included a strong condemnation of slavery in the tract, writing "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Museum Of American History
The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves, and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific, and military history. Among the items on display is the original Star-Spangled Banner (flag), Star-Spangled Banner. The museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution and located on the National Mall at 14th Street (Washington, D.C.), 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. History The museum opened in 1964 as the Museum of History and Technology. It was one of the last structures designed by the renowned architectural firm McKim Mead & White. In 1980, the museum was renamed the National Museum of American History to represent its mission of the collection, care, study, and interpretation of objects that reflect the experience of the American people. The museum site had previously held two Temporary buildings of the National Mall, temporary war buildings constructed in 194 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Mall
The National Mall is a Landscape architecture, landscaped park near the Downtown, Washington, D.C., downtown area of Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States. It contains and borders a number of museums of the Smithsonian Institution, art galleries, cultural institutions, and various memorials, sculptures, and statues. It is administered by the National Park Service (NPS) of the United States Department of the Interior as part of the National Mall and Memorial Parks unit of the List of areas in the United States National Park System, National Park System.. The park receives approximately 24 million visitors each year. The core area of the National Mall extends between the United States Capitol grounds to the east and the Washington Monument to the west and is lined to the north and south by several museums and a federal office building. The term ''National Mall'' may also include areas that are also officially part of neighboring West Potomac Park to the south and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chattel Slavery
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perform some form of work while also having their location or residence dictated by the enslaver. Many historical cases of enslavement occurred as a result of breaking the law, becoming indebted, or suffering a military defeat; other forms of slavery were instituted along demographic lines such as Racism, race. Slaves may be kept in bondage for life or for a fixed period of time, after which they would be Manumission, granted freedom. Although slavery is usually involuntary and involves coercion, there are also cases where people voluntary slavery, voluntarily enter into slavery to pay a debt or earn money due to poverty. In the course of human history, slavery was a typical feature of civilization, and was legal in most societies, but it is no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Betty Hemings
Elizabeth Hemings ( 1735 – 1807) was an enslaved mixed-race woman in colonial Virginia. With her master, planter John Wayles, she had six children, including Sally Hemings. These children were three-quarters white, and, following the condition of their mother, they were enslaved from birth; they were half-siblings to Wayles's daughter, Martha Jefferson. After Wayles died, the Hemings family and some 120 other enslaved people were inherited, along with 11,000 acres and £4,000 debt, as part of his estate by his daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Jefferson. More than 75 of Betty's mixed-race children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were enslaved from birth. They were forced to work on Jefferson's plantation of Monticello. Many had higher status positions as chefs, butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians in the household. Jefferson gave some of Betty's enslaved descendants to his sister and daughters as wedding presents, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Wayles
John Wayles (January 31, 1715 – May 28, 1773) was a colonial American planter, slave trader and lawyer in colonial Virginia. He is historically best known as the father-in-law of Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. Wayles married three times, with these marriages producing eleven children; only five of them lived to adulthood. Wayles' continual rapes of slave Betty Hemings resulted in six additional children, including Sally Hemings, who was the mother of six children by Thomas Jefferson and half-sister of Martha Jefferson. Early life and education Wayles was born in the city of Lancaster on January 31, 1715. The young Wayles likely became aware of the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade and "its ability to make merchants rich". Wayles emigrated as a young man to the Virginia Colony, likely during the 1730s. Career Wayles received his licence to practice law in Virginia in 1741, entering into the profession the very same year. He began his legal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson
Martha Skelton Jefferson ( ''née'' Wayles; October 30, 1748 – September 6, 1782) was the wife of Thomas Jefferson. She served as First Lady of Virginia during Jefferson's term as governor from 1779 to 1781. She died in 1782, 19 years before he became president. Of the six children born to Thomas and Martha, only two survived to adulthood, Martha and Mary. Martha died four months after the birth of her last child. The couple's letters to one another were burned, though by whom is unknown, and Thomas rarely spoke of her, so she remains a somewhat enigmatic figure. (Similarly, Jefferson did not speak much of his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson.) It is widely held that as a widower, Thomas had a long-standing relationship and children with Martha's half-sister, Sally Hemings, a favored slave who was three-quarters white. Early life and education Martha Wayles was born on October 30, 1748 (O.S. October 19, 1748), the only surviving child born to Martha Eppes Wayles (1721–17 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indentured Servant
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an " indenture", may be entered "voluntarily" for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or it may be imposed as a judicial punishment. Historically, it has been used to pay for apprenticeships, typically when an apprentice agreed to work for free for a master tradesman to learn a trade (similar to a modern internship but for a fixed length of time, usually seven years or less). Later it was also used as a way for a person to pay the cost of transportation to colonies in the Americas. Like any loan, an indenture could be sold; most employers had to depend on middlemen to recruit and transport the workers so indentures (indentured workers) were commonly bought and sold when they arrived at their destinations. Like prices of slaves, their price went up or down depending on supply and demand. When the indenture (loan) was paid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free People Of Color
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color (French: ''gens de couleur libres''; Spanish: ''gente de color libre'') were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America. A freed Afr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
