Jefferson's irony: Voice of liberty, slave owner

(CBS News) Founding Father and Third President. Author of the Declaration of Independence and eloquent proponent of the rights of man. That's how most Americans have viewed Thomas Jefferson for most of our history. Martha Teichner now, with another view:

Thomas Jefferson's view from Monticello was as perfect as his high ideals. But at Monticello today, it is the imperfect Jefferson we see, and must judge for ourselves.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote that all men are created equal, owned 600 slaves over his lifetime, and in addition to his legitimate children almost certainly fathered at least six children borne by his slave, Sally Hemings.

For generations, descendents of Sally Hemings told stories implicating Jefferson as father of her children. DNA proved a connection in 1998.

Is Thomas Jefferson any less great because the understanding we have of him now is three-dimensional?

"Most human beings I know are quite capable of denial and hypocrisy," said Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham. "I think Jefferson's virtues were enormous, and his vices were equally enormous.

Meacham has just published a best-selling biography of our third president: "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power" (Random House).

"Looked at in full, you find a man whose life was made possible by slavery, who had misgivings, who as a young man attempted, however feebly, to reform the institution," said Meacham. But in the end, Jefferson "allowed himself to be trapped by the economic, political and cultural circumstances into which he was born."

Web exclusive video: To watch an extended interview with author Jon Meacham click on the video player below.

Elizabeth Chew, curator at Monticello, said that Jefferson's earliest memory was of being handed up on a pillow as a toddler to a slave on a horse. "And we know that his last words were asking Burwell Colbert to adjust his pillow," she told Teichner.

Jefferson's butler, Burwell Colbert, was also a slave. "There would have been an intimate relationship really, from birth to death," said Chew.

The joinery, or furniture-making woodshop at Monticello, was in Jefferson's later years run by a slave named John Hemings, who made many pieces of furniture that are in Monticello today. Chew showed Teichner some of Hemings' beautifully crafted work. "He was very highly skilled, and he was freed by Jefferson in his will and was given the tools of his trade," Chew said.

John Hemings is remembered because of his craftsmanship, unlike so many other Jefferson slaves.

"To be able to sort of have an image of Jefferson that we all know, and behind him the names of the 600 people that he owned in his lifetime, really means that we have to understand slavery in order to understand Jefferson," said Lonnie Bunch, who heads the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture - sponsor of a traveling exhibition about slavery at Monticello.

"What's powerful is, quite candidly, we only know the first names," said Bunch. "And there are some that we just have as 'Unknown,' because we don't even know."

Bunch showed Teichner Jefferson's laptop desk, upon which he wrote early drafts of the Declaration of Independence. The first of those drafts attacked Britain's slave trade, Jefferson writing that King George III "has waged cruel war against human nature itself."

The Continental Congress took the phrase out.

Alongside the rejected passage was the financial reality: Jefferson's farm book, where he would list the births and deaths of the slaves. "He would list the work that they did, so in some ways, it really gives us a full picture of the totality of Jefferson," said Bunch.

Which, at times, contradicts the popular image of Jefferson as a benevolent slave holder. One example was what went on at Jefferson's extremely profitable nail-making workshop at Monticello. "As a young child, your job was to move the nails around. But by the time you're 12, 13, 14, your job is to make these nails," said Bunch.

The boys were routinely whipped to force them to be more productive. "That happened while Jefferson was on Monticello," said Bunch. "It happened when he was gone, because in the 18th century, you couldn't run a plantation without using violence."

A man of his time, Jefferson thought he was benevolent. But even his plan for ending slavery would be considered racist today.

"His view was that at best there could be an emancipation, but then there would be repatriation," Meacham said. "There would be colonization. African-American slaves would leave the United States. He did not foresee a biracial, integrated society, one of the many ironies of his life, because he created a biracial society at Monticello."

Sally Hemings, sister of John Hemings, the furniture maker, was also believed to be Thomas Jefferson's wife Martha's half-sister. The entire Hemings family ended up at Monticello.

But it was in Paris in the 1780s, while Jefferson (by then a widower) was U.S. minister to France, that he supposedly began a nearly 40-year sexual liaison with Sally, who was there with him. By law, she was free in France. Before agreeing to return to Virginia - and to slavery - she set conditions.

"According to her descendants she said, 'I will go back with you if any children we have are allowed to be freed at 21,'" Meacham said. "Jefferson must have been totally flummoxed by this strong-willed, I think quite courageous woman."

In September 1802, a Richmond, Va., newspaper outed President Jefferson, saying, "By this wench, Sally, our president has had several children."

After that, the Jefferson-Hemings story was whispered from one generation to the next for nearly two hundred years by descendants of Sally Hemings - many of whom passed for white.

Television correspondent Shannon Lanier is a direct descendant of Sally Hemings through her son, Madison Hemings. "It's been an interesting journey for me, because it started out when I was a kid, me standing up in class and saying, 'Thomas Jefferson is my great-great- great-great-great-great grandfather,' and being so happy and proud to brag about it when we're studying the presidents. But then the teacher says, 'Sit down and stop telling lies,' and all the kids laugh at you."

By the mid-1990s the laughing had stopped. Historians even at Monticello were becoming believers. Lanier was 19 when he attended the controversial, first-ever combined Hemings-Jefferson family reunion at Monticello in 1999. "Before that reunion, I had only known the Hemings descendants from the Madison line of the family," he said.

Afterward, Lanier and Jane Feldman, the photographer who took a "family portrait" that day, traveled the country interviewing four generations of Hemingses and Jeffersons for a book, "Jefferson's Children."

"Our journey, and the Jefferson story, kind of acts as a catalyst for people to be able to discuss the topic of slavery," Lanier said.

As a child, retired banker Bill Webb was curious. He remembered a family Bible - "A great big thick number" - that his mother had inherited from an uncle. "In there was an entry, among others, 'Brown Colbert, father of Melinda Colbert Edmondson. Immigrated to Liberia, died soon after landing,'" he said.

In 2006 Webb's wife, doing some research, found Brown Colbert listed as a Monticello slave. It turns out he was the brother of Jefferson's butler, Burwell Colbert, and as a boy worked at the nail-making workshop, which Webb decided he had to see.

"Here I am standing on the very same land where my ancestor had worked as a young preteen," Webb said. "Now, that's heavy. It was something that brought tears to my eyes, to say, 'My God, my God...'"

Thomas Jefferson is buried at Monticello. Inscribed on his monument, the achievements he wanted to be remembered for, including the Declaration of Independence.

But he will be remembered, as well, for the legacy that is not written here.

For more info:

• Thomas Jefferson's Monticello
• "Getting Word" - Monticello oral history project
• "Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power" (Random House)
• "Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family" by Shannon Lanier and Jane Feldman (Random House Books for Young Readers)
• National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.
• Thomas Jefferson: Liberty & Slavery (Smithsonian)
• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture