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Henry Wiencek - Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
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Genre................: Audiobook
Source...............: CD
Year.................: 2012
Ripper...............: EAC (Secure mode) / LAME 3.92 & Asus CD-S520
Codec................: LAME 3.92
Version..............: MPEG 1 Layer III
Quality..............: avg. bitrate: 96kbps
Channels.............: Stereo / 44100 hz
Tags.................: ID3 v1.1, ID3 v2.3
Information..........: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/master-of-the-mountain-henry-wiencek/1110787150
Playing Time.........: 10:58:32
Total Size...........: 459.32 MB

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Overview
Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson’s papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson’s world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.

So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profits” gained from his slaves—and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he’d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children—in his ledgers they are recast as money—while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call “a vile commerce.”

Many people of Jefferson’s time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

Library Journal
Samuel Johnson once summed up the great American paradox when he asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" The perplexing question has long haunted Jefferson scholars in particular, forcing many either to ignore it or to turn the "sage of Monticello" into a hapless victim of circumstances beyond his control. In this lucid treatment, however, Wiencek (An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America) deftly explores the economic calculus behind Jefferson's gradual cooling toward emancipation and eventual acceptance of human capital as a great "investment opportunity." Wiencek argues forcefully that Jefferson not only failed to follow the advice and example of his peers (including Washington, Lafayette, Paine, and Kosciuszko) and embrace emancipation but was in fact a "pioneer in the monetizing of slaves" and went to great lengths to impose "his own reality" on his "little familial empire." VERDICT Wiencek's insightful and engaging account is recommended to both the illustrious Virginian's detractors and to his devotees. A fine complement to Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello