Isaac Jefferson, also likely known as Isaac Granger (1775 - ca. 1850) was a valued, enslaved artisan of U.S. President Thomas Jefferson; he crafted and repaired products as a tinsmith, blacksmith, and nailer at Monticello.
Although Thomas Jefferson gave Isaac and his family to his daughter Maria and her husband John Wayles Eppes in 1797 as a wedding gift, Isaac Jefferson/Granger appeared to gain his freedom by 1822, according to his memoir. In the 1840 census he was recorded as Isaac Granger, a free man working in Petersburg, Virginia. The Rev. Charles Campbell interviewed him there and published his memoir under the name of Isaac Jefferson in 1847. Granger/Jefferson describes Thomas Jefferson as a master, and his part in the lives of his slaves.
Read more about Isaac Jefferson: Early Life, Service At Monticello, Marriage and Family, Moving From Monticello, Freedom and Memoir
Famous quotes containing the words isaac and/or jefferson:
“My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference—asking good questions—made me become a scientist.”
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“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.”
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