Holding the show to two minutes exactly (because we also have a few radio listeners) sometimes makes it tough to tell the whole story of the rules behind en taille, or entail.

Because, you see, en taille doesn’t just refer to land in Virginia; it refers to all property. And that includes slaves. And Jefferson, who was absolutely a slave owner (he inherited a little over 50 slaves when he was 21, and inherited another 135 slaves when his father-in-law died—this made him the second-largest slave owner in Albemarle County), was a complicated man in this particular respect. Because although he was a slave owner, he also fought in various courts to have people freed. In one case the man who was freed was so grateful that he worked for Jefferson for wages the rest of his life. And he argued more than once that people should not be imported to the US for slavery purposes. He finally got this law passed in Virginia in 1778, making that state the first to ban international slave trade.

Jefferson proposed legislation that would have outlawed slavery in all of the territories should they become states, but it fell short by a single vote.

Similarly, Jefferson wrote about gradual emancipation for slaves while simultaneously writing about Blacks being mentally inferior to Whites. As I said: complicated.

Jefferson did manage to get international trade to/from the US banned altogether while he was President, but this still did nothing for people born in captivity.

After he died, he still owned 135 slaves. 130 of them were sold off to pay debts; five of them were freed. All of them were males from the Hemmings family. However, in one case the slave was freed but his wife and eight children were sold. That slave, Joe Fossett, managed to earn enough money to buy back his wife and two children in a relatively short period of time, but it took them 23 years to eventually free all of the children.

Complicated.

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