Author Annette Gordon-Reed on Jefferson and his family of slaves in the video below: more about "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings", posted with vodpodJefferson's hidden slave legacy     By Allan Little BBC News, Monticello, Virginia Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and third US PresidentThomas Jefferson's home at Monticello is a place of pilgrimage for Americans of every political stripe.Thousands come every day.They stand on the terrace and look down on the forested green plains of Virginia.They gaze in awe at Jefferson's little chess set, where he sat, two hundred years ago, with his friend and apostle James Madison. Between them, these two men in effect dreamed a new nation into existence.Jefferson designed Monticello himself.JEFFERSON AND HIS SLAVESPICTURE GALLERYIt is true to the man - the elegant proportions, the white domed roof above pillared porticoes, the bricks so brown they are almost ebony - the colour of the Virginia soil from which they were hewn and baked.Huge sash windows bring light flooding in. This is the aesthetic of the rational eighteenth century mind - the Enlightenment in architectural form. But slave hands baked those bricks and stacked them, and throughout his life time more than two hundred slaves - Jefferson's personal property - worked the fields of his estate.Slavery and equality"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal".The words of the American Declaration of Independence are Jefferson's own. In the US the natural ruling coalition since Jefferson's election in 1800 has been a coalition of Southern Whites and Catholics in the North East and Mid West against their common enemy: white New England Protestants Michael Lind, New America FoundationAll men, he goes on, "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" and among these are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".How did the author of that ringing declaration of universal human rights reconcile himself to the ownership of slaves?I