My family had a close relationship with Thomas Jefferson, though not related to him.. My great-grandfather sold him 4200 acres to build his summer home on at POPLAR FOREST. At his death, my great uncle William Cobbs bought the property back. It is now a museum.

Our family has many letters from Jefferson, and their answers, carefully noted and saved.
I believe most of them are at the University of Virginia and some are available in various collections of Jefferson’s writings.

The reason I give all of this preamble is to establish a source of reliable information about Jefferson and slavery.

My grandfather Cobbs and great-grandfather Cobbs were both very religiously inclined as Prebyterian church-builders and supporters, with sons and nephews as pastors. The church of that time, the Presbyterian church in Virginia, was violently opposed to slavery, but could do little about it because of the established need for labor in the fields.
When Jefferson was Govenor of Virginia, he introduced a bill to abolish slavery but it was put down and never voted upon.
It is very easy to imagine the frustration of a man of great intelligence and power not being able to move the mass of monied peoples in the area of slavery. Could he free his own slaves? Technically he could, but he noticed that each time a slave was released as “free’, he was usually seized and put into slavery ina neighboring state, or sometimes simply shanghaied into some other nearby plantation.
Most Virginians looked upon slaves as chattels and the laws supported that. Jefferson again when President investigated the Federal possibilities of abolishing slavery but found the same resistance North and South that he had found when attempting to abolish slavery in Virginia. He finally abandoned the idea except in his letters to friends.
His love affair with Sally Hemmings,his slave, may be a result of his thinking. His wife had died of pneumonia and he, like any other man, needed feminine companinship, and took the girl 12 years his junior into his bed.
When in France as Ambassador from the United States and particularly as a friend of Lafayette, he brought his mistress Sally Hemmings with him, and she was put in school and taught to speak, read and write French.

There is a tendency among unknowledgeable people to use the framework of the present to give them an excuse to say,”Why didn’t Jefferson free all of his slaves and particularly in his will?”
The reason is clear…in the tenure of the time, they would have had no where to go, or would have been seized by slave-sellers, or sent to other states, would have starved. Jefferson kept them intact for their own good.

Word of mouth is not a good historic source, but perhaps in some cases can carry as much weight as historians writing from written sources.

My great-aunts were much with their aunts on my Father’s side of the family. They lived to be 96 to 104 years. The one who had the most sense of history was Mary Love Cobbs 1861-1961.
She was a first woman student at Cornell Univesity, and with a Masters Degree, returned to Virginia to be principal of the Maury Latin School in Virginia. She was very intelligent, a writer of note, and a lover of the history of the United States.

She was also the recipient of the Jefferson letters that came to the family, and the listener to HER aunts who KNEW Jefferson and with their brothers and husbands, had a correspondence with him for years.

Both families excoriated slavery while having large numbers of slaves. My grandfather had 108 slaves. It is notable that none left after obtaining their freedom, and that their families still live and work on the same “plantation”while other members have gone on to greater things(one grandchild was education editor at NEWSWEEK.)

Imagine the problem that an intellectually oriented family despising the idea of slavery but having inherited hundreds of slaves…what to do? They couldn’t legally be freed…there were no havens in other states until the time of the Civil War…so what they did was ameliorate the condiitons.
At my grandfather’s large farm, one of the first free schools in America was established and the building and old desks and tables can still be seen there…but the amazing thing is that SLAVE CHILDREN attended its five grades along with the aristocratic white children.
Much of this was the heritage from Jefferson and his impact on my family.

Think of him as a thwarted hater of slavery, doing his best within the laws and customs of his time.