But those words also created a glaring contradiction. Of the estimated 2.5 million people living in the American colonies, about 500,000 were enslaved people of African descent, the majority of whom lived in the southern colonies. About 200,000 lived in the largest colony, Jefferson’s Virginia. At the time Jefferson wrote that part of the Declaration, he owned nearly 200 people at his home plantation, Monticello, and other sites. While working on the document in Philadelphia, he shared rooms with his enslaved valet, Robert Hemmings, the 14-year-old half brother of his wife, Martha.