We're filming today at Montalto, part of the original Jefferson estate at Monticello. And this is a wonderful hill that overlooks Monticello and gives us a great view of the house. If you look below you'll see the house, Monticello, and the estate. And today's lecture is about slavery. And we thought this would be a good place to start, because we can get an overview of the institution. Jefferson owned some 607 slaves over the course of his life. He sold about 100, mostly in the 1790s. Some of these were gifts to family members. And that was during a period in which he devoted much of his efforts in his first retirement, from serving in the federal government, to improving his plantation. And so let's take a brief look at Jefferson's plantation, and see if we can figure out the geography of slavery at Monticello. Just start at the house of course, this is where the house servants lived and worked. And those are the slaves who are most familiar to us, people in the Hemings family including Sally Hemings. His concubine or his mistress later in life. And if we move to the right, down the hill, you'll see the garden. He was very proud of his garden. And in this garden it was sort of an experimental place where he would see what vegetables could be adapted to this part of the world. This was for the purposes of feeding the many people who lived at Monticello but also it was a kind of a scientific laboratory for Jefferson. Of course slaves were involved in the garden of skilled slaves. And there were more skilled slaves right above the garden. If you see a row of trees there, and you can see a road going in behind those trees, that's Mulberry Row. And that's where skilled artisans had their shops. This is where Jefferson established a nailery to produce nails, and exploiting the labor of young boys, and producing for local markets. So he was on a small scale into industrial manufacturer. But the real plantation of course is spread far beyond across those 5,000 acres that Jefferson owned here. But you don't see them when you look at the mountain you see, what to us looks like a park or a forest. And part of that area was a deer park at one point in Jefferson's life. And it established a very unusual scene for racial slavery in Virginia. Jefferson built at the top of a little mountain. That's what Monticello means in Italian, and it's a bizarre place to build. It's inefficient. It's hard to get there. It's hard to improve the landscape, that is to level the top of the mountain, a tremendous engineering feat. Actually a tremendous feat for all of the slaves who worked on it,. But one of the things that Jefferson was doing was establishing how unusual he was. He set up a juxtaposition between civilization and nature. Those trees and that topography were very important to him. It's unprecedented in Virginia. Before we go on, up to the top of Montalto, this wonderful hill overlooking Monticello, a couple of observations are in order. First, Jefferson keeps his distance from most of his slaves. This is important. He keeps meticulous records. He knows who they all are, and he seeks to manage them intelligently. But it's hard to say that there's much of a personal relationship with the vast number of his slaves. Most Virginia plantation houses would be located in the center of what would amount on the bigger plantations to a kind of agricultural village, almost reminiscent of a manor in Britain with a village nearby. But that relationship that Jefferson has with his slaves is mediated. It's buffered by the surrounding landscape, which he had very self-consciously designed to establish himself in relation to nature. The second thing to keep in mind is that, Jefferson built on top of a mountain in order to command a view. This great view scape 360 degrees only interrupted or punctuated you might say by Montalto, where we are right now. And Jefferson was a kind of natural philosopher of nature. And he saw himself standing in relationship to nature, as a civilized gentlemen and a philosophical gentleman, who had a broader view of things, who looked west and imagined the future of the country. That's a familiar conceit when we talk about Jefferson. And he loved to talk about the prospects for Charlottesville and the surrounding area. For Virginia and for the whole country. But Jefferson also took the big view of slavery. And this is what we're gonna explore in today's lecture when we get to the top of this mountain.
