In January 1827, an 11-year-old boy was put up for auction on the lawn of Monticello, the estate of Thomas Jefferson, the third U. S. president who had written that all men are created equal. The boy’s father, a free man, stood among the crowd.
That changed nothing. It would take 23 years and a second auction before they stood together again. The boy’s name was Peter Fossett. He was born inside Monticello on June 6, 1815, and was raised as if he were free.
One of Jefferson’s own grandsons taught him the alphabet, in a state that would soon make it a crime for someone like him to learn to read. His mother, Edith Hern Fossett, ran the kitchen, and his father, Joseph Fossett, ran the blacksmith shop. Peter grew up wearing a blue nankeen suit, a red Moroccan cap, and red Moroccan shoes, with a silver watch his father had given him—a remarkable childhood for a child whose name appeared in estate papers under property. Peter remembered watching the Marquis de Lafayette visit Monticello in 1824, when the entire plantation was given a holiday.
He also remembered the day word spread that Jefferson had died, long before it was confirmed. He was ten years old. Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, deeply in debt—more than $100,000, equivalent to over $2 million today. To settle the estate, his heirs announced a public auction.
The notice, published in the Richmond Enquirer beginning November 3, 1826, listed 130 enslaved people for sale, described as among the most valuable ever offered in Virginia. The same advertisement also listed a marble bust of Jefferson and his copying press for sale. The man who signed the notice was Thomas J. Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson and executor.
Nine months before his death, Jefferson had added a codicil to his will granting freedom to five skilled men, including Joseph Fossett, who was to become free one year after Jefferson’s death. But at the time of the January 1827 auction, Joseph was still legally part of the estate. He had no right to bid on his own family. The auction began January 15, 1827, and lasted five days.
Neighbors, professors from the new University of Virginia, and free Black people who had gathered money to buy loved ones all attended. Peter’s mother Edith and her two youngest children were bought for $505 by Jesse Scott, a free man connected to the family, but they were not free—they simply had a new owner. Peter’s 16-year-old sister Martha was sold to a mathematics professor, and another sister was sold as part of a group of four. Peter himself was sold to Colonel John R.
Jones. Peter later described that moment simply: “I was born and reared free, not knowing that I was a slave, then suddenly, at the death of Jefferson, I was put up on the auction block and sold to strangers. ”
At the new owner’s house, Peter kept reading. One evening, Colonel Jones found him spelling out the word “baker” by the fire.
Jones threw the book into the flames, warned his sons not to teach Peter, and told the boy directly: “If I ever see you with a book again, I will give you thirty-nine lashes on your bare back. ” The number was not random; it was the maximum punishment traditionally cited from scripture, often recited by men who considered themselves merciful. Peter continued learning anyway. He decided to teach himself to write, using a copybook his father had given him before the family was separated.
The only time he could be alone was when he asked permission to bathe. By the dying embers of the fire, he practiced his letters. The first sentence he chose to copy again and again was: “Art improves nature. ”
While Peter learned in secret, his family scattered.
His father, freed in the summer of 1827, worked as a blacksmith for wages. In 1833, he saved enough money and came to buy his son. Colonel Jones refused, saying he would not sell Peter at any price. Peter later said the family had become so attached to him that they would not part with him, adding that being a valuable servant only made the lock stronger.
In 1837, Joseph Fossett signed a deed of liberation for his wife, five of his children, and four of his grandchildren, after ten years of work. Peter’s name was not on that document. Around 1840, the Fossetts moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, without him. Peter was 25 years old.
By then, Peter could read and write in a beautiful hand he had taught himself. He ran a night school, teaching enslaved people to read and write, and he even risked writing free passes that let enslaved people escape their masters. After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, Virginia law made it illegal for Black people to gather to learn to read and write. Peter continued teaching anyway.
Each escape raised his value in the eyes of his owners, which only made them more determined to keep him. He wrote a free pass for his sister Isabella, and she walked to Boston, where no one could sell her. But he could not get himself out. His family was just across the Ohio River in Cincinnati, about 500 miles away.
He tried to escape once, failed, and was returned. Colonel Jones kept him, which was not mercy but calculation. In 1850, with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, even free states became hunting grounds for those seeking to recapture runaways. Peter decided to try again anyway.
“My parents were here in Ohio, and I wanted to be with them and be free,” he said. “So I made up my mind that I would be free or die in the attempt. ”
He fled, was captured, bound, and taken to Richmond, one of the largest slave markets in the United States. “For the second time, I was put on the auction block and sold like a horse.
” He was 35 years old. But friends of his owner bought him and sent him north across the Ohio River to his father in Cincinnati. The men who bought him had every legal right to keep him, but instead they sent him home. Joseph Fossett, then about 70 years old, was reunited with the son he had tried so many years to buy.
Peter Fossett spent the next decade in Cincinnati helping others cross the river, working alongside Levi Coffin, the Quaker whose home was the busiest station in the region. The Fossett family is estimated to have helped hundreds of people on their way north. Peter started a catering business and married Sarah Mayrant Walker, a hairdresser who had trained in New Orleans. When Sarah was forced off a streetcar in Cincinnati for being a Black woman, she sued the company and won, leading to streetcars designated for Black women.
In 1870, the couple founded the First Baptist Church of Cumminsville and paid for most of its construction. Peter served as its pastor for 32 years. In January 1898, a reporter from the New York World interviewed Peter at his home at 313 Stone Street in Cincinnati, calling him the last living slave of Thomas Jefferson. In June 1900, a Charlottesville newspaper reported that Peter, then 85, had returned to Virginia as a free man to visit the house where he was born.
He stood on the lawn of Monticello once more. Seven months later, on January 3, 1901, he died in Cincinnati. He was buried in Union Baptist Cemetery, beside his father, his mother, and his wife. Seventy-three years earlier, a man had taken a spelling book from a boy’s hand and thrown it into the fire.
What the fire never reached was a copybook hidden at the bottom of a chest, and three words a child taught himself by dying embers: Art improves nature.