Weaving slavery into a narrative about Thomas Jefferson usually presents a challenge to authors, but one writer managed to spin this vicious attack and terrible punishment of a nailery boy into a charming plantation tale. In a 1941 biography of Jefferson for “young adults” (ages twelve to sixteen), the author wrote: “In this beehive of industry no discord or revilings found entrance: there were no signs of discontent on the black shining faces as they worked under the direction of their master…. The women sang at their tasks and the children old enough to work made nails leisurely, not too overworked for a prank now and then.” It might seem unfair to mock the misconceptions and sappy prose of “a simpler era,” except that this book, The Way of an Eagle, and hundreds like it shaped the attitudes of generations of people about slavery and African-Americans. Time magazine chose it as one of the “important books” of 1941 in the children’s literature category, and it gained a second life in America’s libraries when it was reprinted in 1961 as Thomas Jefferson: Fighter for Freedom and Human Rights.20
In describing what Mulberry Row looked like, William Kelso, the archaeologist who excavated it in the 1980s, writes, “There can be little doubt that a relatively shabby Main Street stood there.”21 Kelso notes that “throughout Jefferson’s tenure, it seems safe to conclude that the spartan Mulberry Row buildings…made a jarring impact on the Monticello landscape.”
It seems puzzling that Jefferson placed Mulberry Row, with its slave cabins and work buildings, so close to the mansion, but we are projecting the present onto the past. Today, tourists can walk freely up and down the old slave quarter, and they have computer-generated images and sounds magically transmitted into their smartphones. But in Jefferson’s time guests didn’t go there, nor could they see the cabins from the mansion or the lawn. Only one visitor left a description of Mulberry Row, and she got a glimpse of it only because she was a close friend of Jefferson’s, someone who could be counted upon to look with the right attitude. When she published her account in the Richmond Enquirer, she wrote that the cabins would appear “poor and uncomfortable” only to people of “northern feelings.”
There is a scene from the construction of Monticello that would make an excellent diorama, one of those old-fashioned museum exhibits that make you feel you are actually looking through a window into the past.
Jefferson moved onto Monticello Mountain as a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor in November 1770. During a snowstorm on a bitterly cold day he went to observe the digging of a cellar. Wrapped in a coat, the young master watched a sixteen-year-old girl dig into frozen clay. The crew consisted of four men, two sixteen-year-old girls, and “a lad”—all slaves hired by his contractor.22 He wrote a description of the work, taking note of the crew’s output for the day, which lasted about eight and a half hours in the frigid weather. Half-frozen, the slaves took frequent breaks to warm up by a fire. An instinctive engineer and calculator, Jefferson measured their output, a hole about 3 feet deep and 132 feet square. He was not commenting on slavery but making engineering and labor notes, setting down for future reference how much digging could be accomplished by youthful laborers on a terrible day.
Our diorama depicting the harsh reality of slave labor—teenage girls and a boy digging frozen clay in a snowstorm to make the cellar of a great mansion—might stir a sense of injustice in our modern breasts and inspire us to wonder what the young Jefferson might have thought about this scene.
Perhaps we think we know the answers: he inherited slavery; it was the accepted system; he believed that black people were inferior; it was impossible to get anything done in Virginia without slaves. Attempting to quiet debate on this vexing, politically charged subject, Dinesh D’Souza echoes this sentiment when he writes, “Jefferson and the founders faced two profound obstacles. The first was that virtually all of them recognized the degraded condition of blacks in America and understood it posed a formidable hurdle to granting blacks the rights of citizenship.”23
But if we push an imaginary button on our imaginary diorama, we will hear a voice-over narration in Jefferson’s own words. After describing the work in his notebook, he wrote down a verse from Alexander Pope expressing his own condition: “Let day improve on day, and year on year; / Without a pain, a trouble, or a fear.” So it might seem that D’Souza was right, that Jefferson had no moral qualms about what he saw. But the voice-over continues: after copying Pope’s optimistic, forward-looking verse, Jefferson wrote an aphorism in Latin—“Fiat justitia, ruet coelum”—“Let there be justice, even if the sky falls.”24 Years later he would call this his guiding maxim.
Violent contradictions roil the pages—a turmoil of doubts, loathings, self-recrimination, all vying with the imperative to create a productive plantation and the imperative to have peace and justice on the mountain. Jefferson had lately read a savage indictment of slavery by the English poet William Shenstone, a subversive, damning attack by a troublesome foreign intellectual, an attack on the American system that Jefferson did not ignore or rebut but copied into his notebook. He copied out the lines proclaiming that the country of the slave master is “stain’d with blood, and crimson’d o’er with crimes.” He copied the sentiment that the master is “the stern tyrant that embitters life.” In Shenstone’s poem, the voice of a slave, torn from his native land, denounces the masters, their cruelty, and their hypocrisy: “Rich by our toils, and by our sorrows gay, / They ply our labours, and enhance our pains.”
The pages of Jefferson’s notebook offer a diorama of the young man’s psyche—the architect and planter struggling against the moralist, seeking a way to absorb this foul, repugnant system into his interior landscape and into the exterior landscape he is shaping. Jefferson planned a mountaintop cemetery where he would bury both blacks and whites in common ground—“one half to the use of my own family; the other of strangers, servants.” The graveyard would pay everlasting tribute to the slaves: “On the grave of a favorite and faithful servant might be a pyramid erected of the rough rock stone, the pedestal made plain to receive an inscription.”25 He wrote out an “Inscription for an African Slave” using Shenstone’s verse that calls the master a tyrant, making a monument of self-denunciation.
It is highly ironic that Jefferson planned a common burying ground for blacks and whites. Much of the bitterness over the question of Sally Hemings and her relation to him arose from the wish of some slave descendants to be buried in the Jefferson family cemetery on the mountaintop—a request that was rejected by the “documented” Jefferson descendants who own the cemetery. Yet their distinguished ancestor had envisioned everyone resting together for eternity. As it turned out, Monticello ended up with separate cemeteries.
Jefferson’s inner debate continues in the pages of his notebook. His copying a passage from Horace, the great Roman poet of the pastoral life, suggests that he is taking moral refuge in the knowledge that he was an heir to classical slavery. “Happy the man who, far from business cares…works his ancestral acres.”26 Horace’s character, a moneylender, retires to the countryside after a strenuous, stressful life. The future that Jefferson envisions for himself at Monticello is like that of Horace’s Roman in his villa: “what joy to see the sheep, hurrying homeward…to see the wearied oxen…and the home-bred slaves, troop of a wealthy house.”
Jefferson had grown up among “home-bred slaves.” As a child, he had been conditioned to feel safe among the black household servants, enveloped in a relationship of trust, loyalty, and intimacy. They were his guardians. He preserved a memory, from the age of two, of being lifted into the arms of a slave who held the young master safely through a long journey—“he often declared that his earliest recollection in life was of being…handed up to a servant on horseback, by whom he was carried on a pillow for a long distance.”27
Archaeology has yielded an insight into the psychology of the slavery Jefferson grew up with. From his mountaintop Jefferson could look down on the site of his old family home, Shadwell, a modest frame house. Marks in the ground sh
ow that a fence separated it from four slave cabins housing some thirty people. A handful of trusted slaves lived in a cabin and kitchen building within the pale, but fences and gates kept most of the slaves at a distance.*28 Jefferson wrote down a vivid recollection of someone bullying or beating a slave: “The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” He did not identify “the parent,” but the scene is so vividly described that it was likely Jefferson’s own mother or father.29
As he grew into manhood, Jefferson said that he’d felt virtually alone in believing that the Africans were more than just the equivalent of livestock. He wrote in 1814 to a fellow Virginian:
From those of the former generation who were in the fulness of age when I came into public life,…I soon saw that nothing was to be hoped. Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of those unfortunate beings, not reflecting that that degradation was very much the work of themselves & their fathers, few minds have yet doubted but that they were as legitimate subjects of property as their horses and cattle. The quiet and monotonous course of colonial life has been disturbed by no alarm, and little reflection on the value of liberty.30
A Virginia law enacted in 1723 forbade owners to free a slave “upon any pretence whatsoever,” with one exception. A slave who performed some meritorious service could be freed, but the manumission had to be approved by the governor and the governor’s council.31 Though slaves were private property, the government interfered with an individual’s right to manumit that property because private choice could undermine the institution of slavery. If owners could free slaves at will, there would be no stopping the growth of a class of free blacks. Thus the maintenance of slavery required the imposition, by the government, of rigid class discipline among the slave owners. The Virginia government, entirely controlled by slaveholders, policed their peers to ensure that no emancipationist mavericks rose up among their number.
Jefferson determined to do something about a system that treated people like cattle. After his election in 1769 to Virginia’s House of Burgesses, as he writes in his autobiography, “I made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves.” In his 1814 letter he describes what happened:
In the first or second session of the Legislature after I became a member, I drew to this subject the attention of Colonel Bland, one of the oldest, ablest, & most respected members, and he undertook to move for certain moderate extensions of the protection of the laws to these people. I seconded his motion, and, as a younger member, was more spared in the debate; but he was denounced as an enemy of his country, & was treated with the grossest indecorum.32
He blamed a hidebound mentality for the vociferous rejection of his emancipation idea. The lawmakers were deaf to principled argument: “during the regal government, nothing liberal could expect success.”
Jefferson made his emancipation proposal around the same time he took on an intriguing legal case, Howell v. Netherland, that illuminates the shifting, increasingly ambiguous racial borderland in colonial Virginia, where strict enforcement of racial laws could have the effect of making white people black.
In the winter of 1769, Samuel Howell, a mixed-race indentured servant who had escaped from his master, sought a lawyer in Williamsburg to represent him in suing for freedom. His grandmother was a free white woman, but his grandfather was black, so Howell had become entrapped in a law that prescribed indentured servitude to age thirty-one for certain mixed-race people “to prevent that abominable mixture of white men or women with negroes or mulattoes.”33 Howell, aged twenty-seven, was not indentured forever, since he would be freed in about four years, but nonetheless Jefferson felt angry enough over this denial of rights that he took Howell’s case pro bono.
Jefferson later became famous for his diatribes against racial mixing, but his arguments on behalf of Howell, made more than a decade before he wrote down his infamous racial theories, suggest that the younger Jefferson harbored doubts about the supposed “evil” of miscegenation. The word “seems” in the following sentence suggests that he did not quite accept the prevailing racial ideology: “The purpose of the act was to punish and deter women from that confusion of species, which the legislature seems to have considered as an evil.”
Having just one black grandparent, Howell probably appeared very nearly white. But with the full knowledge that Howell had African blood, Jefferson argued to the justices that he should be immediately freed. He made his case partly on a strict reading of the original law, which imposed servitude only on the first generation of mixed-race children and could not have been intended, Jefferson argued, “to oppress their innocent offspring.” He continued: “it remains for some future legislature, if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [the punishment of servitude] to the grandchildren and other issue more remote.” Jefferson went further, declaring to the court: “Under the law of nature, all men are born free,” a concept he derived from his reading of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, the concept that would later form the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. In the Howell case, Jefferson deployed it in defense of a man of African descent.
Jefferson’s close reading of the statutes and his invocation of the law of nature left the justices unmoved. At the conclusion of Jefferson’s argument the opposing attorney stood up to begin his response, “but the Court interrupted him,” as Jefferson recalled, and issued a summary judgment against Howell.
The young Jefferson was not finished with his campaign against “unremitting despotism.” In a few short lines he sketched out a solution: free the slaves and make them citizens. “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa.” So wrote Jefferson in the summer of 1774. He wove that declaration into a statement intended for presentation to a gathering of Virginia’s dissidents, then to a national congress of colonial representatives, and ultimately to King George III. It rehearses many of the points Jefferson later put into the Declaration of Independence. As he worked through the process of writing the nation into existence, he envisioned not only freedom for the slaves but also their “enfranchisement,” their incorporation into the citizenry. Given his later history and the tenor of his times, the formula sounds preposterous, but that is what he proposed. He was trying to pull the people far beyond where they thought they could go. His cousin Edmund Randolph, who heard the document read aloud in Williamsburg, commented that “it constituted a part of Mr. Jefferson’s pride to run before the times in which he lived.”34
A moment of political crisis had inspired Jefferson. Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had just dissolved one legislature for its radical tendencies and was refusing to seat another, so the legislators decided to meet unofficially in Williamsburg. A gathering of freeholders in Albemarle County chose Jefferson as one of their two delegates to the Williamsburg conference and voted their approval of a set of resolutions he laid before them. He forged these talking points into a fiery manifesto, A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
Jefferson’s “glowing sentences” in Summary View, observes Dumas Malone, were “written in the white heat of indignation.” Declaiming the doctrine of natural rights, Jefferson “regarded himself as the spokesman of a free people who had derived their rights from God and the laws.”35 Ascending to a “prophetic” tone, Jefferson “grounded his argument on the nature of things—as they were in the beginning and evermore should be.” Jefferson was not in a compromising mood, and his statement, Malone says, “left no place…for tyranny of any sort.”36
Jefferson himself said that Summary View was “penne
d in the language of truth” and free from “expressions of servility.”37 In his passionate defense of liberty he staked out an extreme position. Edmund Randolph thought that Summary View offered “a range of inquiry…marching far beyond the politics of the day.”38 A modern historian concurs: “Broader and even more prescient are references to the rights of ‘human nature,’ which Jefferson daringly ascribed even to the chattel slaves.”39 Summary View makes no mention of exiling the blacks after freeing them. The clear implication is that people of African descent had natural rights and deserved a place in this country as free people.
Randolph reported that some sections of the document were received with enthusiasm, others not. “I distinctly recollect the applause bestowed on [most of the resolutions], when they were read to a large company…. Of all, the approbation was not equal.” But the whole document was embraced by “several of the author’s admirers,” who paid to have it printed and circulated as a pamphlet.* 40 Summary View, its incendiary provision about slavery intact, won Jefferson a wide reputation as an eloquent spokesman for liberty and led to his selection to write the Declaration of Independence.
The Howell case and Summary View cast light on the enduring question of the meaning of the phrase “all men.” When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” could he have possibly meant to include the slaves? The usual answer is no. It has seemed evident that Jefferson expected the word “white” to be silently added before “men.” But when he wrote Summary View, he included the Africans under the law of nature, and when he argued for Howell, he declared that all men are born free, without qualification.41
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 3
