It stands as a sad ending to the life of the great champion of liberty, freedom, and equality whose conflicted position on slavery has been well documented.
But there is an even sadder story behind that tragic event that is detailed by historians Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges in "Friends of Liberty," their absorbing account of the intertwined lives of Jefferson, the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull, a free black who served as Kosciuszko's orderly during the American Revolution and lived in Stockbridge, Mass.
There is in Kosciuszko a lost-cause heroism and in Hull an antic humor, but the underlying story of the three "friends of liberty" is the "betrayal of freedom" that culminated in the Monticello slave auction.
It was during the Revolution that Kosciuszko not only developed a close personal relationship with Hull but, as the authors note, "his admiration for black Americans grew as the war wore on, and so did his revulsion at chattel slavery." Of particular importance was their strength and skill in building fortifications, bridges, and roadways at West Point.
Jefferson and Kosciuszko may have met during the Revolution - although not for certain until the fall of 1797, after Kosciuszko returned to the United States a man without a country, following the defeat of the Polish insurrection he had led against Russia.
By then, the authors write, Jefferson's "fertile mind had been churning on slavery and the character of African Americans" and "in the company of Kosciuszko" was "primed for a spirited discussion about liberty and slavery."
The culmination of that relationship was Kosciuszko's will, written in April 1798 before he returned to Europe, in which he stated that Jefferson "should bye out of my money" - back pay still due him from his service during the Revolution - "So many Negroes and free them, that the restante [remaining] sums should be Sufficient to give them education and provide for ther maintenance."
