Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
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Understanding that he was not engaged in business calculated to endear him to the elite of his time and place—an elite to which he very much wanted to belong—Wayles had a political sense of his own. One of the things political people do (whether they are political in the vote-seeking sense or simply in the context of seeking status among one’s neighbors) is take advantage of whatever avenue may be at hand. Along with the purchase and sale of slaves, the church was one of the most widely shared aspects of life among rich Virginians. Believers or not, prominent men—including Jefferson—were expected to play a role in the life of one’s parish. Wayles apparently decided that he would assume such a role, thus building up social capital among those who may have seen him mainly as the face of the creditor enemy or as, in the words from The Virginia Gazette, “ill-bred.” He took pains to help fill the pulpit on different occasions. In a letter, a contemporary reported these efforts of Wayles’s, writing: “Mr. Wayles is extremely kind in doing what he can.… He has engaged Parson Masson already and designs likewise to get Parson Duglish, he says to make us laugh.” (Ibid., 67.)
UNDERTOOK LEGAL WORK FOR WAYLES MB, I, 64.
MARRIED BATHURST SKELTON JHT, I, 157.
AND THEIR SON, JOHN, DIED TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/martha-wayles-skelton-jefFErSON.
AN ATTRACTIVE WIDOW TDLTJ, 43.
SUITORS LURKED ABOUT IbiD., 44.
QUESTIONS OF BLOOD, SEX, AND DOMINION As noted, Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, is the masterwork on this subject. I also learned much from Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003); and Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia, 2002).
A MAN NAMED HEMINGS Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, 255. The source is Madison Hemings’s oral history. See also Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 49–50.
THE EPPES FAMILY OF BERMUDA HUNDRED Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 50–51.
BECAME WAYLES’S PROPERTY IbiD., 57.
GAVE BIRTH TO SEVERAL CHILDREN IbiD., 59.
HIS DAUGHTER’S TWO STEPMOTHERS JHT, I, 432–33. Wayles’s two other wives were Tabitha Cocke and Elizabeth LOMAX.
“TAKEN BY THE WIDOWER WAYLES” Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, 255.
ELIZABETH HEMINGS BORE FIVE CHILDREN Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of MonticellO, 80.
IN 1773 CAME A SIXTH IBiD.
“ANY LADY IS ABLE” Ibid., 346. As Gordon-Reed notes, the members of a white master’s official family—that is, the one sanctioned by custom and law and the church—would pretend that the head of their household was not doing what he was self-evidently doing. And so mixed-race children lived in a cultural twilight in which they were denied yet fought over as white family members worried that guilt or love or duty (or all three) would lead the master to give his nonwhite children some part of his estate. (IBiD.)
THE YEAR HE TURNED UP MB, I, 209.
A “ROMANTIC, POETICAL” DESCRIPTION PTJ, I, 65.
AN ELDERLY WOMAN IbiD., 66.
DESTINED FOR EACH OTHER TDLTJ, 44.
“I HAVE WHAT I HAVE BEEN TOLD” PTJ, I, 62.
ORDERED A CLAVICHORD Ibid., 71.
“LET THE CASE BE” IBiD.
HALF-DOZEN WHITE SILK COTTON STOCKINGS Ibid., 71–72.
THE REVEREND WILLIAM COUTTS MB, I, 285. See also Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 101.
THE VIRGINIA GAZETTE REPORTED THE MARRIAGE The Virginia Gazette, January 2, 1772.
REFERRED TO HER AS A “SPINSTER” PTJ, I, 86–87.
BORN AT ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING MB, I, 294.
THE JEFFERSONS REMAINED AT THE FOREST GB, 35.
SNOW HAD GROWN TOO DEEP Randall, Jefferson, I, 64.
PRESSED ON THROUGH THE FORESTS IBID.
AT SUNSET IBId.
FIRES WERE OUT IBiD.
“THE HORRIBLE DREARINESS” IBID.
DISCOVERED PART OF A BOTTLE OF WINE Ibid., 65. On the subject of Monticello, Jefferson had been worried for some months about the seeming inadequacy of the nascent estate to receive a new bride. “I have here but one room, which, like the cobbler’s, serves me for parlor for kitchen and hall,” Jefferson said on Wednesday, February 20, 1771. “I may add, for bed chamber and study too. My friends sometimes take a temperate dinner with me and then retire to look for beds elsewhere. I have hopes however of getting more elbow room this summer.” (PTJ, I, 63.) His vision for Monticello was mythic. “Come to the new Rowanty,” he wrote Robert Skipwith, Patty’s brother-in-law, in August 1771. “A spring, centrically situated, might be the scene of every evening’s joy. There we should talk over the lessons of the day, or lose them in music, chess, or the merriments of our family companions. The heart thus lightened, our pillows would be soft, and health and long life would attend the happy scene.” (Ibid., 78.)
MOVED ON TO ELK HILL MB, I, 286.
AT ITS PEAK ELK HILL WAS 669 ACRES Ibid., 366.
“THE TENDER AND THE SUBLIME” PTJ, I, 96.
OSSIAN’S EPIC IMAGERY Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (New York, 2009) offers a full-scale treatment of the literary decepTiON.
“AS TWO DARK STREAMS” Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 142–43.
A CAREFUL HOUSEKEEPER Scharff, Women Jefferson Loved, 93–94.
“MRS. JEFFERSON WOULD” Bear, Jefferson at MonticellO, 3.
A CALLER AT MONTICELLO VTM, 8.
“COPIOUS AND WELL-CHOSEN” IbID.
“AS ALL VIRGINIANS” IbiD., 9.
CARR DIED OF A “BILIOUS FEVER” MB, I, 340.
SKETCHING OUT HIS PLANS TDLTJ, 47.
JOHN WAYLES DIED MB, I, 329.
TO MOVE ELIZABETH HEMINGS Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of MonticellO, 92.
THE HEMINGS FAMILY See, for instance, ibid.; Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello (Charlottesville, Va., 2000); and TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/hemings-family (accessed 2012).
SIX · LIKE A SHOCK OF ELECTRICITY
“THE AMERICANS HAVE MADE A DISCOVERY” “Speech on Townshend Duties, 19 April 1769,” The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, II, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford, 1980), 231. See also Virginia History, Government, and Geography Service, Road to Independence: Virginia 1763–1783 (Memphis, Tenn., 2010), 33.
“THINGS SEEM TO BE HURRYING” PTJ, I, 111.
THE EARLY AFTERNOON HOURS Ibid., 104. Writing from Williamsburg, John Blair told Jefferson that there had been “a very moderate trembling of the earth [in Williamsburg], so moderate that not many perceived it, but Dr. Gilmer informs me it was a pretty smart shock with you.” (IBID.)
REPUTEDLY MENTALLY DISABLED SISTER Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 48, 71.
A SPRINGTIME SNOWSTORM GB, 55.
KILLED “ALMOST EVERYTHING” IBId.
“THIS FROST WAS GENERAL” IBID.
A SECOND DAUGHTER ON SUNDAY MB, I, 372.
SHE HAD BEEN PREGNANT For accounts of the toll of childbirth on women in these years, see Catherine M. Scholten, “ ‘On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art’: Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 34, no. 3 (July 1977): 426–45, and Childbearing in American Society: 1650–1850 (New York, 1985), 42–49; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996), 71–84; Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750 to 1950 (New York, 1986), 36–63; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 143–86.
THE PURCHASE OF “BREAST PIPES” Scharff, Women Jefferson Loved, 93. See also MB, I, 373.
THE TOWNSHEND ACTS Morgan, Birth of the Republic, 34–35.
THE BOSTON TEA PARTY Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 231–37.
NONIMPORTATION AGREEMENTS PTJ, I, 27–31, is one eXAMpLE.
THE POSSIBLE ARREST OF AMERICANS Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 219–20. In 1772, New England radicals had burned a British ship on customs duty, the HMS Gaspee, after it had run aground in Narragansett Bay. When no one was arrested in the case, London announced a special investigation and said that anyone apprehended in the matter would be tried in England. For the colonists the decree was infuriating and terrifying. Here was a grave imperial threat. (IBID.)
COMMITTEES OF CORRESPONDENCE Ibid., 221.
HE ORDERED A “ROBE” Imogene E. Brown, American Aristides, 86.
“OUR SALE OF SLAVES GOES” PTJ, I, 96.
TO REBEL QUITE ANOTHER Isaac Samuel Harrell, Loyalism in Virginia: Chapters in the Economic History of the Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1926), 1. It was not a clear-cut call. “Despite the events of the preceding decade, in 1773 loyalism was the logical state of mind in Virginia; loyalism called for the maintenance of the long established social, religious, and political order,” wrote Harrell. “In religion, in social customs, in personal contact, Virginia, of all the colonies in North America, was most closely akin to the mother country.” (Ibid.) In terms of Virginia’s predominant position, Harrell believed the March 1773 session, which was prorogued, to be “the beginning of the end” of royal rule. (Ibid., 30–31.)
Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 30–52, offers an intriguing account of the roots of revolution. “Why these Americans engaged in revolution had much to do with the sort of people they were.” (Ibid., 31.) Middlekauff argued that the combination of the Protestant emphasis on the centrality of the individual and the Whig sense of history created the climate for revolution. (Ibid., 30–52.)
For Jefferson, whether it was Crown or Parliament, the consistent theme was usurpation. Even Loyalists were willing to acknowledge London bore some blame; their point was that the constitution could, with effort, be brought back into balance. For example, in June and July 1774, in William Rind’s Virginia Gazette, Thomson Mason, brother of George, argued that the English constitution was “the wisest system of legislation that ever did, or perhaps ever will, exist.” To Mason, the “monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy [each] possessed of their distinct powers, checked, tempered, and improved each other.… The honor of the monarchy tempered the impetuosity of democracy, the moderation of aristocracy checked the ardent aspiring honor of monarchy, and the virtue of democracy restrained the one, impelled the other, and invigorated both.” (Virginia History, Government, and Geography Service, Road to Independence, 37.) The problem, Mason said, was that the aristocracy had knocked the system off balance by usurping power through Parliament.
Looking back from the perspective of 1926, Charles M. Andrews also argued that the central motivation came from rivalries between the colonial assemblies and Parliament:
Primarily, the American Revolution was a political and constitutional movement and only secondarily one that was either financial, commercial, or social. At bottom the fundamental issue was the political independence of the colonies, and in the last analysis the conflict lay between the British Parliament and the colonial assemblies, each of which was probably more sensitive, self-conscious, and self-important than was the voting population that it represented. For many years these assemblies had fought the prerogative successfully and would have continued to do so, eventually reducing it to a minimum, as the later self-governing dominions have done; but in the end it was Parliament, whose powers they disputed, that became the great antagonist. (Andrews, “American Revolution,” 230.)
Reflecting on the American Revolution from the perspective of 1790, William Smith, Jr., the New York–born chief justice of Canada, wrote Lord Dorchester:
The truth is that the country had outgrown its government, and wanted the true remedy for more than half a century before the rupture commenced.… To expect wisdom and moderation from near a score of petty Parliaments, consisting in effect of only one of the three necessary branches of a Parliament, must, after the light brought by experience, appear to have been a very extravagant expectation.… An American Assembly, quiet in the weakness of their infancy, could not but discover in their elevation to prosperity, that themselves were the substance, and the governor and Board of Council were shadows in their political frame. All America was thus, at the very outset of the plantations, abandoned to democracy. And it belonged to the Administrations of the days of our fathers to have found the cure, in the erection of a Power upon the continent itself, to control all its own little republics, and create a Partner in the Legislation of the Empire, capable of consulting their own safety and the common welfare. (Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas, A History of Canada, 1763–1812 [Oxford, 1909], 256.)
Proposals for reconciliation were considered but none really seemed practicable. The most prominent was that of Joseph Galloway. (Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 257–58.) And there was John Randolph’s, described and reprinted in Mary Beth Norton, “John Randolph’s ‘Plan of Accommodations,’ ” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 28, no. 1 (January 1971): 103–20.
HIS COUSIN JOHN RANDOLPH Samuel Willard Crompton, “Randolph, John,” February 2000, American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/01/01–00767.html (accessed 2011). In London, Mary Beth Norton wrote, John Randolph was “one of the most active and respected refugees, playing a major role in each of the three organizations formed by the American exiles. In 1779 he was selected to present to George III a petition on the American war signed by 105 loyalists; a few months later he led a group of loyalists who offered their services to the king in the event of a French invasion of Great Britain; and in 1783 he was named chairman of the committee established by Virginia refugees to review the property claims they intended to submit to the British government.” (Norton, “John Randolph’s ‘Plan of Accommodations,’ ” 104.) For more on Loyalists and the Revolution, see Wilbur H. Siebert, “The Dispersion of the American Tories” in Wright, Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, 249–58; Harrell, Loyalism in Virginia; Richard Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution (New York, 2010); Thomas B. Allen, Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War (New York, 2010); and Paul H. Smith, “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 25, no. 2 (April 1968): 259–77.
ABOUT A FIFTH OF WHITE AMERICAN COLONISTS Gordon S. Wood, American Revolution, 113. The usual figure for the number of Loyalists in America during the Revolution is a third, but recent scholarship based on militia recruitment puts the estimate at closer to a fifth. Sixty to eighty thousand Loyalists left America during the war. (Ibid.) I am indebted to Wood for insights on this pOInT.
“NON SOLUM NOBIS” MB, I, 37.
FOR THE ELITE, REVOLUTION WAS Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), 1–15, delineates the tensions that divided Virginians by class before and during the war. “The way patriot leaders organized for war and reacted to the demands of those they expected to fight it depicts a conservative, anxious, sometimes fearful group clinging to traditional notions of hierarchy, deference, and public virtue in an attempt to maintain its privileged position within an increasingly challenged and challenging social and political culture,” McDonnell wrote. (Ibid., 6.)
VIRGINIA’S PUBLIC FINANCES Harrell, Loyalism in Virginia, 22–25.
THE MONEY THAT PLANTERS OWED CREDITORS Ibid., 26–29.
SUCH DEBTS WERE NOW “HEREDITARY” Ibid., 26.
VIRGINIANS OWED AT LEAST IBID.
NEARLY HALF THE TOTAL IbID.
IN MAY 1774, JEFFERSON AND PATRICK HENRY Ibid., 26–27. The measure failed, Harrell wrote, because the “conservatives … were not yet ready for the leadership of these radicals. In October, 1777, when the principles of rifle democracy were supreme, a law was passed which provided in part for the sequestration of these debts.” (Ibid., 27.)
JOHN WAYLES DIED IN 1773 Sloan, Principle and IntereST, 14.
ESTATE WORTH £30,000 IBID.
LARGEST CREDITOR, FARELL AND JONES Ibid. There was also a contested £6,000 charge against Wayles over a shipment of slaves. (Ibid., 14.)
DECIDED TO BREAK UP Ibid., 15.
JEFFERSON’S LIABILITY IbiD., 16.
WAS NOT SOLELY ECONOMIC The economic issues at play in the Revolution is, of course, a subject of long and ferocious debate. Known as the “progressive interpretation” (or the “Beardian interpretation” after the historian Charles Beard), it can be summarized, as Esmond Wright pointed out in 1966, with the following quotation from Louis M. Hacker: “The struggle was not over high-sounding political and constitutional concepts: over the power of taxation and, in the final analysis, over natural rights: but over colonial manufacturing, wild lands and furs, sugar, wine, tea and English merchant capitalism within the imperial-colonial frame-currency, all of which meant, simply, the survival or collapse of work of the mercantilist system.” (Wright, Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, 114–15.) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., offered a more nuanced view, arguing that the emphasis of interpretation should be on “the clashing of economic interests and the interplay of mutual prejudices, opposing ideals and personal antagonisms—whether in England or in America—which made inevitable in 1776 what was unthinkable in 1760.” (Ibid., 103.) For selections of Hacker’s and Schlesinger’s arguments, see ibid., 103–42.