Master of the Mountain Quotes

“Many writers on slavery today have emphasized the “agency” of the enslaved people, insisting that we pay heed to the efforts of the slaves to resist their condition and assert their humanity under a dehumanizing system. But as slaves gain “agency” in historical analyses, the masters seem to lose it. As the slaves become heroic figures, triumphing over their condition, slave owners recede as historical actors and are replaced by a faceless system of “context” and “forces.” So we end up with slavery somehow afloat in a world in which nobody is responsible.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“Forgotten also is Jefferson’s blunt rationalization for enslaving African-Americans. Augustus John Foster, who visited Jefferson at Monticello in 1807, reported that “he considered them to be as far inferior to the rest of mankind as the mule is to the horse, and as made to carry burthens.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“We simply cannot believe Jefferson’s complaints about his slaves, which fit into his pattern of shifting blame to others for his own mistakes and weaknesses. During his presidency Jefferson averred that the slave’s “burden on his master [is] daily increasing,” yet as the economic historian Steven Hochman has found, “during his presidency Jefferson’s nailery and his farms provided an income that should have met reasonable expectations. The debit side of Jefferson’s balance sheet was where he had his problems”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“Rand herself composed a sentence that could have come from the pen of a Southern planter: “The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“Lafayette had a powerful insight, detecting in slaveholders a combination of “prejudices, Habits, and Calculations.”26 This combination acted as their engine, in place of a conscience. Racism ratified their power, as did the dispensations of Providence. They were precursors of the Ayn Rand protagonist of the twentieth century.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“blacks had natural rights, and slavery abrogated those rights; emancipation was desirable; emancipation was imminent; emancipation was impossible until a way could be found to exile the freed slaves; emancipation was impossible because slaves were incompetent; emancipation was just over the horizon but could not take place until the minds of white people were “ripened” for it.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson & His Slaves

“He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson & His Slaves

“Among the completely contradictory points he advanced about slaves and slavery, we have: the institution was evil; blacks”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson & His Slaves