Jeffersons Wolf – Nicholas Guyatt

He assured her that he was safely back at home “sink[ing] into the bosom of my family.”24 During his “retirement,” which barely lasted three years, Jefferson ceased attempts to outsource his labor reforms to German farmers or Maryland overseers and took up the challenge himself. In 1796, Jefferson superintended his “force”—fifty-eight enslaved men and women—at Monticello as they harvested wheat at the base of the mountain in the relentless June heat.

Together, eighteen cradlers, eighteen binders, six gatherers, three loaders, six stackers, two cooks and four carters moved in unison across the fields, with “head man” George Granger Sr. driving a mule cart “from tree to tree as the work advanced,” sharpening scythes and cradles and handing out whiskey as a reward for the backbreaking work. In all, these men and women cut and stacked 320 acres of wheat in only six days.

Jefferson stood at the sidelines, notebook in hand, recording their productivity.25 When the harvest was in, Jefferson convinced himself that his laborers resembled independent farmers more than enslaved human beings. The “whole machine,” Jefferson gushed, would “move in exact equilibrio, no part of the force … lessened without retarding the whole, nor increased without a waste of force.” Enthralled by this flourishing of Enlightenment rationality in Virginia, Jefferson didn’t seem to realize that although he had relinquished the whip, he had only increased his surveillance and control of African American bodies.26 Jefferson may have imagined that his supervision of the wheat harvest enabled enslaved people to assume more independent agricultural roles, but a glaring problem remained: wheat production—unlike tobacco— demanded only a few months of intensive labor per year, most of it in summer.

If Jefferson was to retain so many enslaved people—about 130 people lived at Monticello at any given time—he would need to carve out new roles for them on his plantation. While increasing numbers of Black men and women would labor and reside on the Monticello mountaintop by the 1790s, enslaved families quartered at the three outlying farms that comprised Jefferson’s five-thousand-acre estate—Tufton, Lego, and Shadwell—combined agricultural duties with craft labor. A man named Frank, whom Jefferson inherited from his father in 1764, lived at the Tufton quarter farm but made charcoal on the Monticello mountaintop, providing the plantation’s nerve center with much-needed fuel and heat.27 Jefferson was not alone in his quandary about the size of his “force.”

Planters and farmers across the Upper South, who had relied on large workforces to cultivate labor-intensive tobacco before independence from Britain, faced the same problem. Some enslavers who had transitioned to wheat production sold their “excess” human property, fueling the rise of an internal slave trade to the Deep South, while others simply leased people out to generate income.

Christa Dierksheide & Nicholas Guyatt THE BELKNAP PRESS of HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England • 2026 OceanofPDF.com Copyright © 2026 by Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt All rights reserved Cover credit: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, Giancarlo Costa / Bridgeman Images; crop of A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia, 1751 / Library of Virginia Cover design: Madeline Partner 978-0-674-27832-5 (cloth) 978-0-674-30528-1 (EPUB) 978-0-674-30529-8 (PDF) No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

EU GPSR Authorised Representative LOGOS EUROPE, 9 rue Nicolas Poussin, 17000, LA ROCHELLE, France E-mail: [email protected] The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Dierksheide, Christa, author | Guyatt, Nicholas, author Title: Jefferson’s wolf : a founding father’s troubling answer to the problem of slavery / Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2026. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2025040484 (print) | LCCN 2025040485 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Political and social views | Enslaved persons— Relocation—United States | Slavery—United States—History | Missouri compromise Classification: LCC E332.2 .D54 2026 (print) | LCC E332.2 (ebook) LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025040484 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025040485 OceanofPDF.com CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1.

EMPIRE AND CRISIS 2. WAR 3. COLONIZATION 4. AMALGAMATION 5. TRANSITION 6. SEPARATION 7. DIFFUSION 8. DEPORTATION EPILOGUE NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX OceanofPDF.com INTRODUCTION EVERYONE WANTED TO KNOW what Thomas Jefferson was thinking. The third president of the United States had long since retired from public life, but in 1820 he was still receiving a stream of visitors at Monticello, his splendid mountaintop home in Virginia, and countless letters from friends and strangers alike.

“Congress are about to assemble,” John Adams had written Jefferson the previous November, “and the Clouds look Black and thick.” For the first time since the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the nation was dangerously close to foundering on the issue of slavery. The settlers of Missouri had petitioned Congress for admission to the Union, but their draft constitution made slavery legal in the new state.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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