Thomas Jefferson's "Deplorable Entanglement"

Thomas Jefferson: Liberty & Slavery

Thomas Jefferson helped to create a new nation based on individual freedom and self-government.  His words in the Declaration of Independence expressed the aspirations of the new nation. But the Declaration did not extend “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to African Americans, indentured servants, or women. Twelve of the first eighteen American presidents owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration and called slavery an “abominable crime,” yet he was a lifelong slaveholder. Fearful of dividing the fragile new nation, Jefferson and other founders who opposed slavery did not insist on abolishing it. It took 87 more years―and the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment―to end slavery.

Jefferson and the Enlightenment

Jefferson and other members of the founding generation were deeply influenced by the 18th-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy stressed that liberty and equality were natural human rights. 

Colonial Americans argued that King George III and Parliament had denied them the basic rights of British citizens. Despite the pervasiveness of slavery in their society, the revolutionary generation envisioned a new American government that secured the rights and freedoms of its citizens. However, these rights and freedoms did not extend to slaves. 

The Declaration of Independence

In the Declaration, Jefferson eloquently announced the creation of the new American nation. He presented Americans as a self-governing people committed to the principles of liberty and equality in the face of British tyranny. “All men are created equal,” Jefferson wrote, and the importance of this ideal necessitated that “a people … advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained” in order to “institute new government.” The founders’ vision did not include one-fifth of the American population: enslaved men, women, and children who labored in nearly every one of the “Free and Independent States.”

“This Deplorable Entanglement”

Jefferson and many other patriots believed slavery should be abolished in the new American nation. Emancipation would fulfill the ideal that "all men are created equal."

Yet over the course of his life Jefferson himself owned 600 people. He was unable to extricate himself from what he called the “deplorable entanglement” of slavery.

Jefferson spent much of his life wrestling with and proposing various solutions to this national problem. But slavery was not abolished, and he remained a slaveholder throughout his life.

A Society Dependent on Slavery

Slavery made the world Thomas Jefferson knew. The colonial society into which he was born—in 1743 in what became Albemarle County, Virginia—would not have existed without it. Enslaved people tilled his father’s tobacco fields, cured the tobacco and packed it for shipment, cooked and served the family’s meals, cared for Thomas Jefferson and his siblings, and accompanied him to the College of William and Mary. The profits from slave-based agriculture made his parents’ household and lifestyle, and his education and exposure to the colonial capital of Williamsburg, possible. Though Jefferson came to abhor slavery, his livelihood depended on it.

Enlightenment, Freedom, and Slavery

Enlightenment philosophy strongly influenced Jefferson’s ideas about two seemingly opposing issues: American freedom and American slavery. Enlightenment thinkers argued that liberty was a natural human right and that reason and scientific knowledge—not the state or the church—were responsible for human progress. But Enlightenment reason also provided a rationale for slavery, based on a hierarchy of races..., "Slavery at Monticello: Paradox of Liberty," The Smithsonian African American History and Culture.