by John Ferling
Despite his earlier disclaimer, Jefferson in 1821 set to work on an autobiography, though he could not bring himself to call what he was writing by its real name. Instead, he said that he was making “some memoranda” for his “own more ready reference, and for the information of my family.” He carried the story down to his arrival in New York to join Washington’s cabinet, stopping there, as he evidently believed the “Anas” adequately recorded the years that followed.21 But he feared that all of this might be insufficient for the preservation of his reputation. In one of his last letters, Jefferson beseeched Madison to “take care of me when dead.”22
Jefferson’s reputation would have been better served, and so would humanity, had he devoted his last years to the eradication of slavery. Before the Revolution, he had acted nobly to terminate the foreign slave trade, a possible first step toward ending slavery in Virginia. His Declaration of Independence, with its lyrical passages on liberty, inspired many in his time, and later, to rethink slavery. Had Congress retained his paragraph attacking slavery, all of subsequent American history might have been different, as it also would have been had Congress approved Jefferson’s proposal in 1784 to prohibit slavery in the western territories. Jefferson did not seek to end slavery when modernizing Virginia’s legal code during the war. Manumissions increased Virginia’s free black population by sixfold in the 1780s, and the number of manumissions tripled in the twenty years after 1790, but this was also a period when slavery was “fixed more securely on the Virginians,” in the words of historian Robert McColley. Jefferson understood the times better than most, and he knew that any attempt to end slavery in Virginia during the 1780s was doomed to fail.23
Jefferson’s concerns about slavery were subsumed by other matters during his five years in France, and resisting Hamiltonianism became his overarching concern once he returned home. After 1784, not only did slavery consume less of his thought than it had a decade earlier, but also, in the wake of Santo Domingo’s bloody slave insurrection in the 1790s, Jefferson saw whites in slave Virginia in the proverbial position of the man riding the back of tiger. (Or, as he put it: “We have the wolf by the ear.”)24 In Notes on the State of Virginia, he had written that prejudice among whites, and a lust for revenge on the part of blacks, meant that emancipation would be followed by race conflicts, even racial extermination. The ghastly slaughters in the Caribbean slave revolts confirmed his fears. Thereafter, Jefferson felt that Virginia had two choices: maintain slavery as a means of race control or end slavery and banish all African Americans from Virginia.
He believed “the revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe”—the tempest he had played a vital role in unleashing—was the cause of the slave revolt in the West Indies. He predicted that a “combustion must be near at hand” in Virginia, adding that “only a single spark is wanting to make that day tomorrow.” In 1797, he said that Virginia’s leaders must do something, and quickly, to prevent a catastrophe. If nothing was done, wrote Jefferson from his lonely mountaintop in an Albemarle County in which nearly 50 percent of the inhabitants were enslaved, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”25
Bringing slavery to a gradual end, followed by the expulsion of the freed slaves, was what he wanted done. But he did nothing toward that end in the 1790s. Furthermore, as president he declined to act in 1802 when the Virginia assembly, in response to the discovery and suppression of a planned slave insurrection in Richmond, contemplated legislation calling on the United States to set aside western lands as an asylum for emancipated slaves. Though Governor James Monroe thought the idea might succeed with the backing of the president, Jefferson refused to entertain such a notion. Insisting that the West was for white yeomen only, he instead endorsed the notion of sending liberated slaves “out of the limits of the US,” an impractical expedient given both its cost and the revulsion with which it was greeted by many. (Jefferson himself estimated in 1824 that the joint cost of compensating slave owners who liberated their chattel and resettling a million and a half freedmen to the Caribbean would run some $900 million, at a time when the annual budget of the United States was merely a fraction of that amount.)26
Five years after Jefferson’s presidency, in 1814, Edward Coles, once Madison’s private secretary, appealed to Jefferson to speak out against slavery. Coles planned to free his slaves and give them land in the Illinois Territory, and he asked Jefferson to assist in the eradication of slavery by formulating and “getting into operation” a plan of emancipation. Although Jefferson acknowledged “our … moral and political reprobation” at not having already acted to banish slavery, he refused to take up the fight. In fact, he inexplicably told Coles that this battle was “an enterprise … for the young,” not for those of his generation. What is more, he insultingly, and dismayingly, lectured this ardent young man who was about to take a personally sacrificial step that Jefferson had never contemplated. Jefferson reproached Coles’s generation for not having “proved their love of liberty” by fighting to eradicate slavery, and he also heaped blame for slavery’s continued existence on the shoulders of Coles and his brethren.27
Despite his inaction, Jefferson told Coles that “love of justice” and “love of country” required that something be done to end the heinous institution.28 But five years later, in 1819, when the Missouri Crisis provided Jefferson with another chance to take a courageous stand against slavery, he failed to seize the moment. The crisis came about when a New York congressman introduced legislation providing for the gradual end to slavery in the new state of Missouri. Congress had previously prevented the expansion of slavery into territories, but it had never attempted to terminate its existence within a state. While the proposed legislation triggered talk of the South’s secession, John Adams, now eighty-four years old, believed that if Congress stopped slavery’s expansion, slavery—hemmed into a few southeastern states—would in time die out.
Acting on his conviction, Adams did something he had not done previously. He gently raised the slavery question with Jefferson. Adams hoped Jefferson would dare to risk his eminent standing, using his influential voice to warn the South that slavery’s expansion posed a great danger to the future of the American Union. Jefferson understood the threat. He said that his reaction to the introduction of the slavery issue into the political arena was akin to being awakened by “a fire-bell in the night,” leaving him “filled … with terror” for the future of the United States. In his heart of hearts, Jefferson may even have suspected that the Union was doomed. Yet, he refused to denounce the spread of slavery, and in private he made it clear that he would stand with the South in defense of slavery.29
In recent years, Jefferson has been criticized by historians who have nearly unanimously concluded that he bore a greater responsibility than any other Founder for “having failed to place the nation on the road to liberty for all.”30 Though Jefferson could hardly have made the nation or the southern slaveocracy do his bidding, he was, with the exception of Washington, the Founder who might have spoken, and acted, against slavery with the greatest influence. Yet, despite his recognition that human bondage was wicked, and his acknowledgement of a moral imperative to end slavery, Jefferson steadfastly refused to consider emancipation during the half century following independence unless it was linked to the exile of the freedmen.
Worse, perhaps, Jefferson, refused to free his own slaves. An established lawyer, he might have freed his slaves during the American Revolution and lived comfortably from his law practice, as did his mentor, George Wythe, who liberated his chattel following his wife’s death. Like Hamilton, Jefferson in the 1780s and 1790s might have alternately held office and practiced law. Moreover, his salary as a government official after 1790 was substantial. He derived an annual salary of $3,500 as a member of Washington’s cabinet. His salary increased by about forty percent when he became vice president and multiplied another fivefold when he ascended to the presidency. During the fifteen years that he held national office between 1790 and 1809, Jef
ferson’s average annual salary was nearly sixteen thousand dollars, several times that of a skilled tradesmen in one of the more lucrative crafts.
However, by the time Jefferson entered Washington’s cabinet, his independence was circumscribed. From the moment in 1773 that he accepted the fortune that John Wayles had bequeathed to his daughter, Jefferson was shackled by debt. Thereafter, it was infinitely more difficult for him to cut his ties to slavery, as his income as a planter offered his best hope of solvency. But there was something else. Coveting the accoutrements of wealth, he never attempted to live austerely. Like Washington, Jefferson made a conscious decision to keep others enslaved so that he might live the sumptuous life.31
Mystery surrounds Jefferson’s thoughts and actions concerning emancipation, though historians have offered abundant conjectures. It has been asserted that he was never interested in ending slavery, and that he believed the denial of freedom to slaves offered the best chance of extending liberty and equality to all white Virginians. One historian has argued that in 1792 Jefferson came to the conclusion that the “births of slave children produced capital at the rate of 4 percent per year,” a transformative assessment that led him to abandon his earlier antislavery inclinations. It has also been suggested that while Jefferson thought slavery was morally repugnant, he believed that morality could not be imposed from the top down; therefore, he presumed that slavery would end only when the citizenry came to think of it as intolerable. Historian Jack Rakove has wisely reminded us that the past really is an unfamiliar place to succeeding generations, and that Jefferson was born into a world that was not only accustomed to slavery but also in which the most enlightened were “only beginning to understand that slavery was an evil of a kind radically different from the other wrongs of life.”32
Jefferson himself offered some clues concerning the decisions he made about slavery. He once said that the slavery debates in Virginia’s House of Burgesses before 1776 convinced him that “nothing was to be hoped” concerning slavery’s eradication in his lifetime. He additionally said that those who had sought to end the slave trade in Virginia in the 1760s had been “treated with the grossest indecorum.”33 Already buried under an avalanche of Federalist invective, he may have flinched in the 1790s at the thought of inviting even more personal attacks. Furthermore, just as many historians have remarked that one war was sufficient for the Founders, causing them to walk the extra mile for peace rather than face hostilities again with a major European power, it may have been that one American Revolution was enough for Jefferson. With his acute anxieties about race relations, he may have been unwilling to pry the lid off the Pandora’s box of slavery. What is more, good leaders need to have both a feel for what is possible and knowledge of how to prioritize their battles. During the 1790s, already embroiled in the fight against Hamilton, Jefferson must have shrunk from introducing other matters that would have increased his difficulties, possibly even assuring the success of Hamiltonianism.
When Jefferson came home at the conclusion of his presidency, a few years before Coles approached him, he was sixty-six years old, tired of politics, and eager for tranquility. He was also consumed with the plague of indebtedness, which eventually exceeded one hundred thousand dollars and forced him to sell his most treasured possession: his library of some 6,700 volumes. Had he freed his chattel, he would have lost Monticello, leaving him without “even a log hut to put my head into,” as he said it with considerable exaggeration.34
Those things may have accounted for his silence concerning slavery. But something else may have played a role as well. James Callender, the newspaper scribbler whose lacerating pen Jefferson had once subsidized, turned on his patron in 1802, furious that he had not been rewarded with a comfortable federal job following the election of 1800. Beginning that September, Callender—writing in the Richmond Recorder, a Federalist paper—announced to the world that Jefferson “keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY…. By this wench Sally, our president has had several children.”35 Callender’s allegations about Jefferson and Hemings continued into the spring of the following year, and in addition, he broke the story of Jefferson’s improper advances toward Betsy Walker nearly forty years earlier. Both stories were picked up by other Federalist editors, who gleefully published them. While savagely attacking Callender, some Republican editors acknowledged that Sally Hemings was a slave living at Monticello who had borne children, though not by Jefferson.
Aside from one opaque denial, Jefferson maintained a stony silence concerning the sensational allegation about his relationship with Hemings.36 Callender’s revelations may also have silenced any inclination that Jefferson felt to speak out against slavery, as he must have feared that the public would inevitably interpret his remarks as confirmation of his protracted intimacy with one of his female slaves. Indeed, while Jefferson took steps to liberate some slaves in his final days, he shrank from emancipating Sally Hemings. In March 1826, Jefferson prepared his will, in which he stipulated that five of his slaves were to be freed. All were from the Hemings family, and two were sons borne by Sally. (Her other living children, both daughters, had left Monticello in 1822 with Jefferson’s apparent consent, going off to live as white people.) To prevent their banishment from Virginia, which after 1806 was required of those who were manumitted, Jefferson successfully appealed to the assembly for permission for the five to live within the state. However, he knew that if he petitioned the legislature on behalf of Sally Hemings, it would be interpreted by many as bearing out the stories that she had been his mistress. Instead, when he died, Sally, who was fifty-three, moved with her sons to Charlottesville and lived as a free person. Eight years later, she was freed by Jefferson’s daughter Martha.37
Jefferson was about to turn eighty-three when he drafted his will. He had lived at home in retirement for seventeen years, for the most part enjoying good health and delighting in the steady parade of admirers who came to the mountaintop to meet him. During all that time, he said, he followed a “regular routine of the day. From sunrise till breakfast only I allot for all my pen and ink work. From breakfast to dinner I am in my garden, shops, or on horse back in the farms, and after dinner I devote entirely to relaxation or light reading.”38 Throughout those years he worked with his farm manager in the hope of making his plantation more profitable, but the place was unsuited to good farming. He invested heavily in two mills, expanded the manufacturing of cloth, and continued operations at the nailery, but while these enterprises increased his income, they contributed little toward the reduction of his indebtedness. During his presidency, Jefferson began construction of an octagonal getaway house in Bedford County, ninety miles away. Finally completed in 1816, he named it Poplar Forest and escaped to it from time to time in the final decade of his life. But he spent most of each year at Monticello, which he shared with Martha—who during her middle years largely lived apart from her husband—and his several grandchildren. His was a busy schedule for a retiree, and a part of it was given over to a voluminous correspondence, including the exchange of hundreds of letters with John Adams.
Jefferson largely avoided politics in these years, but he remained an active reformer, resuscitating the plans for education he had conceived forty years earlier. He drafted legislation for a state system of elementary, secondary, and college education, but once again his reach exceeded his grasp, though the assembly was willing to invest in higher education. For years, Jefferson had contemplated the creation of a university, and at about the midpoint of his retirement he surveyed property in Charlottesville and prepared architectural drawings of a novel “academical village,” as he called it. The assembly eventually approved the creation of the University of Virginia. As a member of its Board of Visitors, he was active in the hiring of its president and faculty, and even drew up plans of class schedules, faculty bylaws, and degree requirements. Classes commenced a year before he died, prompting this man who had spent a lifetime shaping the thought of
others to remark that his last great act was to provide “for the instruction of those who are to come after us.”39
During the next twelve months, Jefferson’s health declined, and as spring faded into summer in 1826, he sensed that the end was near. He did not dread death. He believed that behind the creation of the universe and life there was “a conviction of design” by a “superintending power.” He expected “to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.” Though ready to go, he drew on the last reserves of his formidable willpower and managed to stay alive until July 4, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That same day, John Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts. They had outlived Hamilton, their nemesis, by twenty-two years.40
Hamilton and Jefferson had been major players in provoking substantive changes, though Hamilton, the outsider from the West Indies, had sought to preserve much of the political and social contours of the world that he found when he alighted in America. He failed, of course, and in his final years he believed that his dreams for his country had come to grief. Indeed, nearly everything that he had stood for was being rejected by the American people. By the jubilee of independence in 1826, if not long before, few in the country mourned his absence. Late-nineteenth-century politicians, financiers, and industrialists would breathe new life into his economic programs, but by then much that Hamilton had stood for had become commonplace in the modern industrial states in Europe. One can wonder if the American economy from the Gilded Age forward might have taken the shape it assumed even had Hamilton never been the treasury secretary.
