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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.

Learn more about this author, William Cobbs.
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