Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  A few brief passages in Notes give the impression that as Jefferson was writing them, he glanced toward his window and a bright shaft of reality’s light penetrated his room. Right after a complex sentence concerning the “structure in the pulmonary apparatus” that makes blacks radically different from whites, he continues abruptly, “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome.” Perhaps he might have glimpsed one of the slaves who had lately risked his life on his behalf, facing down the British at Monticello. Further on he writes, “We find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity…of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity.” In these fleeting phrases, he seems to acknowledge the humanity of the people and to stress it for the reader; we get the sense that there is more to this world than Jefferson’s philosophy. His prediction that “ten thousand recollections” of injustice would provoke a race war flew in the face of the unshaken fidelity he had recently experienced. Despite widespread fear among the slaveholders, no uprising had materialized during the Revolution.

  At the outbreak of the war Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, threw the state into a panic by promising freedom to slaves who would fight for the king. The British army additionally recruited some blacks and offered refuge to runaways. It is often said that in Virginia alone thirty thousand slaves ran to the British during the Revolution. The source for this number is Jefferson, and he made it up. He also said that some twenty-seven thousand slaves died of smallpox in British camps during the Revolution; he made up that number as well. The historian Cassandra Pybus, who researched the relevant documents, found that the actual figures were far smaller. Where, then, did Jefferson get his estimates? Pybus found that in a letter detailing the losses from his own plantations, Jefferson wrote that thirty of his slaves had run away and twenty-seven had died of smallpox. He simply took his private numbers and added zeros to create the Virginia numbers.25

  Dunmore’s offer in fact attracted some two or three hundred slaves, not the thousands Jefferson imagined, and many of the people who ran to the British were noncombatant women and children. The most reliable estimate for the total number of “disloyal” slaves is around five thousand men, women, children, and elderly in Virginia and Maryland combined. Some blacks did fight for the British, but Virginia’s masters and mistresses were not murdered in their beds. Some slaves did conspire against their owners and were executed for it; others were whipped but not severely, which suggests that the authorities were not convinced of the seriousness of their offenses. In the atmosphere of crisis, the whites imagined more threats than existed. “There have been many Rumours here of the Negroes intending to Rise,” a man in Williamsburg wrote, but he thought the reports were “without much foundation.”26

  Such was the loyalty of Virginia’s blacks that James Madison proposed an emancipation incentive for slaves who would fight for the state.27 About a third of the seamen who served in Virginia’s navy were black. But it was disloyalty and slacking among whites that presented a much greater problem. Draft resisters rioted, landowners refused to pay taxes, and Jefferson denounced one county as a nest of “delinquents.” Given a quota to fill in Washington’s army, Virginia could muster only about a quarter of the troops it promised.28 Some slaveholders dispatched slaves to serve in their stead and then re-enslaved them after the war. Tasked with defending the state against the British invaders, General Lafayette faced a critical shortage of horses and resistance from Virginians who could have helped him. Virginia’s planters refused to let him take their mounts, and Governor Jefferson backed the planters. “Stud horses and brood mares will always be excepted” from requisition, he told Lafayette, because “to take them would be to rip up the hen which laid the golden egg.”29 Nevertheless, after the war the supposed disloyalty of blacks loomed ominously in Jefferson’s memory as an obstacle to their ever becoming citizens, or at least that is what he strongly implied in Notes.

  If we are to believe what Jefferson claimed in Notes, the greatest barrier to emancipation was the risk of blacks “staining the blood” of the masters. “When freed,” he wrote, “he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” But the subversion of the natural order had already taken place: his own wife’s father, among many others, had mingled the races and destroyed the separation ordained by nature. Years later his friend William Short tried to get Jefferson to modify his views on racial mixing since it had already taken place: “Even in our own country there are some [white] people darker than the gradual mixture of the blacks can ever make us.” As an example Short pointed to Jefferson’s relatives in the Randolph family.30

  Jefferson gave his blessing to an interracial marriage just a few years after writing Notes. He sold one of his slaves, a mixed-race woman, to a white man in Charlottesville so that they could live as husband and wife. The husband was an esteemed business acquaintance of Jefferson’s, a man of substance in Charlottesville. The couple and their free, mixed-race children, technically the offspring of “abominable mixture,” lived together openly, and the family often went up to Monticello to visit their enslaved relatives and bring gifts.* It is doubtful that Jefferson supplied his overseers and white workmen with copies of Notes so that they would abstain from relationships with enslaved women. White workmen fathered two of his top enslaved craftsmen, Joseph Fossett and John Hemmings.

  White women, however, had to be policed. When he revised Virginia’s slave code after the Revolution, Jefferson proposed extreme punishment for a white woman who gave birth to a mixed-race child: if she refused to leave the state, she was to be outlawed, meaning that she was outside the protection of the laws, legally exposed to any punishment devised by a mob or aggrieved husband. The legislature refused to adopt Jefferson’s draconian measure, which suggests an authoritarian streak harsher than the norm of this harsh age and a layer of anxiety over loss of control. As the historian Jon Kukla writes, “Jefferson regarded women’s sexual appetites as equal to or even stronger than men’s, and he felt a deep-seated fear of women as threatening both to his own self-control and to the proper ordering of society…. Jefferson exhibited a deep distrust of women’s capacity to disrupt their homes and his world.”31 The severity of the punishments Jefferson suggested in the revision to Virginia’s criminal code shocked one of his contemporaries, John Armstrong Jr. (whom President Jefferson appointed minister to France in 1804). In his copy of Notes, Armstrong commented in the margin, “This Code has not been adopted and ’tis well it has not…. Death & mutilation show it to be the work of a man quite ignorant of the progress of truth, or quite indifferent to it.”32

  Notes leaves a great deal unsaid. Jefferson never alluded to his own kinship to slaves through his wife and her father. He stressed, rather, eloquently and passionately, that slavery presented an unutterable horror and must be eradicated. Only the most careful reader would perceive the unspoken but crucial connection between the section of Notes that concerns slavery and another section where he makes it plain that slavery was essential to the survival of the new nation. Slaves formed a bulwark against an existential threat to liberty, because as long as America had slaves, the Old World mobs of white working people could be left on the other side of the Atlantic.

  In the section of his book concerning slavery, he wrote of replacing slaves with whites, but in another section he withdrew his proposal of “proper encouragements” and proposed a total ban on immigration for twenty-seven years, the span of time he calculated it would take for the existing population to double. After that hiatus newcomers might be more safely absorbed, resulting in a government “more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable,” but these newcomers would have to be carefully screened.

  Jefferson firmly opposed admitting a particular class of people that we might regard as the vanguard of entrepreneurship—artisans, mechanics, and other independent workers who made their livings by their skills. He looked upon this class of people as inherently debased, a danger to the Republic as grave as slavery. “Corruption of morals,” he wrote
in Notes, was the indelible “mark” set on people who depended for their sustenance on the “caprice of customers.” His use of the word “mark” is striking, because it was commonly used when referring to the mark of race, or the mark of “corruption of blood” attributed to felons. In his view dependence on customers “begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” So, he concluded, “Let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff…. [L]et our work-shops remain in Europe.”

  Insisting upon banning artisans from Virginia, Jefferson brushed aside the added cost of importing manufactured goods from Europe, a premium that, he said, “will be made up in happiness and permanence of government.” This was far better than dealing with the “inconveniences” caused “by the importation of foreigners.” He wrote: “It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible,” particularly under a form of government “conducted by common consent.” The principles of American government “perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason.” Europeans immigrating to the New World came from absolute monarchies, and they would “bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children.”

  Jefferson recoiled from the prospect that foreigners and their children would get the vote and “share with us” the power to affect legislation: “They will infuse into [the law] their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” The future of the nation, and of Virginia especially, presented a grand prospect, but only if the nature of the population could be controlled. John Armstrong made a marginal note on this subject as well: “Mr. [John] Jay is said to have had the same dread of foreigners when he disfigured the Constitution of N.Y. by making their admission to citizenship in that State both tedious and difficult.” Pointing to the Germans of Pennsylvania as examples of people “as fond of freedom and as tenacious of equal government as Mr. J. himself,” Armstrong suggested that all those who share Jefferson’s and Jay’s dread “should recollect that in politics almost every speculative truth is a practical falsehood.”

  But soon enough Jefferson found that he could not let his workshops remain in Europe, and at Monticello he built them with slaves occupying the workbenches and twirling the distaffs. Because these skilled people were slaves, they did not disrupt the happiness and permanence of society. An Englishman who visited Virginia in the early nineteenth century and stopped to see Jefferson at Monticello noted that demographic phenomenon. In Virginia, “the mass of people, who in other countries might become mobs, [were] nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”33

  Notes contains an electrifying jeremiad that might have moved the stoniest heart in the assembly had Jefferson ever delivered it. He foresaw Virginia, “my country,” in wreckage because Virginians refused to give up slavery: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”

  Jefferson was haunted by the vision that God might be on the side of the slaves, that the turning of fortune’s wheel “may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest,” and “under the auspices of heaven” a racial revolution might bring the “extirpation” of the masters. In this lightning flash of terror, the master of Monticello is once more the child of Shadwell, coddled by the slaves he knows but nervously eyeing the fence line, wondering what could be in the minds of the unknown mass of blacks beyond the pale, kept in check by unremitting despotism. As he would do so often, Jefferson articulated what was inarticulate—in this instance, the persistent Anglo-Saxon fear of being overwhelmed by darker people in a horrific, apocalyptic battle like the future ones at the Alamo or Little Bighorn, when the races collide on a frontier.

  The racial sections in Notes captured the predicament of blacks in America and the multiple layers of reality they had to contend with. Jefferson spoke and wrote disparagingly of them in the abstract, when in practice he routinely placed his trust in them, gave them significant responsibilities, exulted over the abilities and output of his slave craftsmen, allowed a surprising degree of autonomy to some slaves, paid some of them for good work, and was related to them. As a matter of day-today reality, the slaves could perceive Jefferson’s trust, the responsibilities they discharged, the loyalties they felt and displayed, and most of all the blood kinship they had with him. But these made up just one layer of reality.

  As an African-American said a century and a half later, after segregation had fallen: “We lived under a hidden law which we did not understand.”34 The most powerful force in the plantation world resided within the mind of the man in charge, concealed by the same “immoveable veil” that Jefferson attributed to blacks. The Jefferson scholar Merrill Peterson once remarked on “the Negroes’…subtle ways of confounding the white folks,” but the slaves were powerless against the fantasies that white people could concoct about them.35 Jefferson’s racial theorizing strikes many modern eyes as irrational and illogical or simply repugnant. If asked, Jefferson could explain every clause, but intellectual consistency was not the point. His philosophy was a tool of control over others and himself. If you have a governing philosophy, you can summarily exclude exceptions, like a Phillis Wheatley, as a hanging judge excludes evidence as it suits him.

  Jefferson made a brief observation in another section of Notes that shows his ability to absorb contradiction. In the section on “public revenue and expenses” he states, “The value of our lands and slaves…doubles in about twenty years. This arises from the multiplication of our slaves, from the extension of culture, and increased demand for lands.” So on the one hand, black people are inferior, disloyal, and dangerous, and they grow in number alarmingly; but on the other, they are extremely valuable assets and multiply most profitably. Should we believe the philosophy or the calculation? They worked together. His assets reliably compounding, his philosophy rendering him deaf to the appeals of humanity, he plowed through any contradiction. He wielded a species of power that made its own reality.

  4

  “The Hammer or the Anvil”

  The sufferings endured by the American people in the Revolution seized one of Jefferson’s early biographers with emotion: “Our fabric, such as it is, is a blood-cemented one. Groans, and tears, and woes unutterable, accompanied every step of its foundation.”1 He declared the crucial importance of telling and retelling the stories of the Revolution—“Let every coming generation of Americans understand these facts”—because only then could the nation be forever knit together by shared emotion.

  The suffering of the people is written in Jefferson’s Farm Book. What makes these woes especially unutterable is that so many of the lives lost were those of children. Next to the names of two girls aged about eight and six Jefferson wrote: “joined enemy & died,” as if they had betrayed him and had been punished.2 Their names were Flora and Quomina. They fled Jefferson’s Elk Hill plantation with their mother, Black Sal, and their brother Jemmy, aged ten. They ran because the British promised freedom. Very little is known of Black Sal. She was not a house servant and had no special skill. In Jefferson’s records she is a single mother marked down as the lowest kind of worker, a “labourer in the ground.”

  The commander of the British forces, Lord Cornwalli
s, hunting for Jefferson and laying waste everywhere in Virginia, during the month of June 1781 made his headquarters at Elk Hill, a plantation fifty miles from Monticello. In American history the name Cornwallis is synonymous with tyranny and terror, but to the enslaved people of Virginia he was the Liberator. So that summer Black Sal put her family’s fate in the hands of the British army. Flora and Quomina died of disease in the British camp. Disheartened, Sal returned with Jemmy to the plantation, where she and her son shortly died.

  Though it was known that the British camps were dangerous, two other laborers in the ground, Hannibal and his wife, Patt, gathered up their six children, all under the age of twelve, and ran to the British to get freedom. All of them died of disease.*3

  The Revolutionary War ended with a mass emancipation of slaves, a landmark event that Americans have largely forgotten because it was enacted by the British, and partly because it puts the taint of treason on African-Americans. This liberation culminated in 1783 as a matter of military honor for British field commanders. They rejected the compromises of the diplomats, applied their own interpretation to the peace treaty, and fulfilled their promise to give freedom to everyone who had reached their lines. In the final months of the Revolutionary War some eight to ten thousand black Americans embarked on British ships from New York and ports in the South. The British emancipation of slaves—most of whom were from Virginia—became a political issue. The Virginia Assembly instructed its congressional delegation to demand reparations from the British government.