Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  Twenty years earlier Jefferson’s emancipation plan had been hooted down in Virginia. It would be painful to risk such humiliation again. But he found at least one ally in William Short, who later wrote to him about a plan “for exciting in these people [the slaves] the idea of property and the desire to acquire it, which I think would be easily done, and which when done, I think would insure the success of the experiment.”30 Among his French friends he felt the heat of an extreme passion for human rights. For Lafayette, the “blood-cemented” fabric of American liberty must enfold blacks as well as whites. From Condorcet, he received a lesson in standing up for one’s beliefs against derision. In the months when he was mulling the métayer idea, Jefferson bought two copies of Condorcet’s book on slavery, began to translate it, and came to these lines: “I shall insist on the laws of justice, not on the interests of commerce. Your tyrants will say that my arguments are trite, my ideas chimerical. True, [there is] nothing more trite than the maxims of humanity and justice, nor more chimerical than the proposition that man should conform to them.”31

  What if Jefferson really meant what he said about slavery being nothing more than avarice and oppression in naked conflict with justice? The cloud of rationalizations and racial theorizing parts to reveal Jefferson seized by the idea that he has finally found the way to free his slaves, to realize a hope he has held for twenty years. The strange thing is that we have become so conditioned to Jefferson the prevaricator that no one believes he meant it. Must every man be either the hammer or the anvil? The answer would come when Jefferson reached home.

  6

  “To Have Good and Human Heart”

  In the salons of France, Jefferson conducted the equivalent of a graduate seminar on slavery as the engine of the American enterprise. Confronted for the only time in his life by abolitionists who were actually in a position to keep him from something he wanted, trading rights for the emerging nation, Jefferson went up against these progressives—men like Lafayette who had worn the uniform of the fight for liberty—matched them theory for theory, trumped them with tales of his experience dealing with slaves, and so deftly explained the peculiar, inexplicable institution that to this day no one can figure out exactly what he meant. But he concluded his time in France with an apparently clear pledge to train and free his slaves on his return to Virginia.

  Other ideas were percolating in his head. While selling America’s tobacco, he knew he would have to abandon planting it himself. (In a strangely modern twist, Jefferson had taken note of the measurable climate change in his region: the Chesapeake region was unmistakably cooling and becoming inhospitable to heat-loving tobacco that would soon, he thought, become the staple of South Carolina and Georgia.) He visited farms and inspected equipment, considering a new crop and the exciting prospect it opened before him. And he envisioned an ambitious engineering project, the rebuilding of a canal and mill, built by his father, that had been washed away in a flood.

  He was also thinking of his mansion. French architecture had fired Jefferson’s imagination. He returned bursting with ideas for building a new Monticello. To erect this Xanadu, while also shifting crops and getting a canal built, he needed both skilled slaves and common laboring slaves. All of them had to be persuaded in one way or another to go along with the master’s ardor for enterprise.

  Once he set foot in Virginia in 1789, Jefferson got down to business. Its morals aside, his elaborate program at Monticello in the 1790s would make an excellent case study in business schools today. Jefferson the philosopher has been endlessly parsed, but Jefferson the on-the-ground manager is most revealing, carrying us closer to the truth of slavery than anything he wrote in Notes or his other explications of slavery. At Monticello in the 1790s we find innovation; strategic investment; the conveyance of assets to the next generation; methods of controlling and motivating a workforce; critical turning points where conflicts must be resolved between cherished ideals and economic goals; and the revitalization of an economic, industrial, and social system supposedly pronounced dead. Owning the workers created unique possibilities for very long-term personnel planning: he could train talented adolescents for posts they would hold for twenty or thirty years. Like many other forward-thinking planters, Jefferson would reimagine an old, widely maligned system to make it fit into a modernizing nation while preserving the values, outlook, and structure of an extremely conservative society.

  Nation-building on two fronts, Jefferson put in place his program for modernizing slavery at home while serving as President Washington’s secretary of state. He retired from that post in 1793 to devote his full attention to Monticello but returned to the political fray in 1796 to campaign for the presidency against John Adams. Coming in second, he became vice president in 1797 but continued to manage Monticello from afar.

  Jefferson had received an astonishing welcome in 1789 when he arrived home at Monticello from France. He had directed his manager, Nicholas Lewis, to extract “extraordinary exertions” of labor from the slaves to stay current with his debt payments. Some slaves had endured years of harsh treatment at the hands of strangers, for to raise cash, Jefferson had also instructed Lewis to hire out slaves.* He demanded extraordinary exertions from the elderly: “The negroes too old to be hired, could they not make a good profit by cultivating cotton?”1 For the five years Jefferson had been gone, Lewis had struggled just to keep the people fed and clothed on farms going to ruin. So when word spread that the owner was returning at last, the slaves welcomed him as a savior. They unhitched the horses from his carriage and pulled it up the mountain themselves:

  When the door of the carriage was opened, they received him in their arms and bore him to the house, crowding around and kissing his hands and feet—some blubbering and crying—others laughing. It seemed impossible to satisfy their anxiety to touch and kiss the very earth which bore him…. perhaps it is not out of place here to add that they were at all times very devoted in their attachment to him.2

  This event might seem to bolster the idea that slaves were, as Jefferson said, like children. His biographer Dumas Malone wrote: “To their simple minds it seemed that he had come home to stay, and he must have thought it good to be there—though he did not like to be the master of slaves.”3 But Jefferson observed that when you thrust people into poverty, you reduce them to “passive obedience.” 4

  Jefferson had assured the French that emancipation was “gaining daily recruits” among younger Americans, and he may have had his own daughter in mind. In a note to her father in 1787, Patsy had expressed ardent abolitionist sentiments. Hearing that a boatload of slaves might be delivered to Virginia, she wrote: “Good god have we not enough? I wish with all my soul that the poor negroes were all freed.”5 But her abolitionism receded when she suddenly needed a dowry.

  Within days of arriving from France, Patsy ran into a distant cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph, whom she had known in childhood. Within weeks the cousins announced their engagement, and they married at Monticello on February 23, 1790. Patsy was seventeen and Thomas Mann Randolph, later known as Colonel Randolph, was twenty-one. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Jefferson and Randolph’s father hastily negotiated a marriage settlement. The senior Randolph (also named Thomas Mann Randolph) bestowed on the couple a 950-acre plantation with livestock and forty slaves. But on close examination, the plantation turned out to be a very dubious “gift,” for it came with a $2,900 mortgage. Alarmed at the onerous debt, Jefferson urged his future son-in-law to refuse the gift.6

  Jefferson wanted Randolph to refuse the gift for another reason. The plantation, called Varina, lay near Richmond, ninety miles from Monticello, and Jefferson did not want his daughter living so far away. Nor did Patsy wish to leave her father’s orbit.7 Not even marriage weakened her attachment to her father. When Jefferson later wrote to Patsy of his plans to return to Monticello after a long absence, she replied that this news stirred in her “raptures and palpitations not to be described.”8

  After very difficu
lt and protracted negotiations Jefferson persuaded the elder Randolph to sell young Randolph his Edgehill plantation, situated in a lovely valley just a few miles north, with a view of Monticello. This transaction took two years to complete. In the meantime, the newlyweds settled into Monticello itself. And with gifts of slaves, Jefferson set up Patsy’s household to emulate his. For her personal attendant he gave her a Hemings—thirteen-year-old Molly, the daughter of Mary Hemings; for a cook he gave her Suck, the wife of his lifelong enslaved companion Jupiter. Though divided ownership put Jupiter’s family at risk of permanent separation, Jefferson would not have seen these gifts as sundering black nuclear families but as consolidating the larger plantation “family.”

  That was the genteel face of the slave system; next he turned to the business side. The transfer of household servants might have been a sufficiently generous wedding gift, but Jefferson could see that young Tom Randolph, saddled with the Varina debt, was bankrupt on arrival. And the elder Randolph, a widower forty-nine years old, was about to marry a nineteen-year-old maiden only two years older than one of her stepdaughters-to-be. (She quickly produced another male heir, whom the patriarch named Thomas Mann Randolph III, in an act of apparent paternal hostility toward Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.) In light of this looming December-May marriage, the elder Randolph’s “gift” might be more accurately characterized as a clearing of the books: he unloaded a debt onto his son, with a farm attached.

  Concerned “to place them in security,” Jefferson promised to give his daughter one of his “best” properties and “25 negroes little and big.”9 The legal document solemnizing the “Marriage Settlement for Martha Jefferson” transferred a farm called Wingo’s, a one-thousand-acre part of the Poplar Forest plantation some ninety miles southwest of Monticello, and twenty-seven slaves. At every level this was a family transaction. The Wingo’s community consisted of five families with children, nine of them under the age of ten, and a couple. The Wingo’s families were very closely related, having lived in isolation on the plantation for decades. Slaves named Tom and Billy were married to the sisters Sarah and Lucy, whose father, Lundy, also lived on the place, as did Tom’s parents and Tom’s brother Jeffery. These slaves formed Patsy’s safety net, for Jefferson put the land and slaves in her name alone, giving her a layer of protection if Colonel Randolph ran into financial problems. And he augmented this gift with a twenty-eight-year-old slave woman and her four small children, all younger than ten.

  Ownership of a critical mass of black people provided financial stability to an upper-class family, and Jefferson could not launch his daughter into marriage without “that capital which a growing family had a right to expect.”10 As Jefferson expected, Colonel Randolph repeatedly encountered financial difficulties and sold or mortgaged slaves to cover his shortfalls.

  The image of slaves carrying Jefferson into his mansion is apt. They had been carrying him for years, and they had no notion of how valuable they really were. Labor was so costly and sought-after in Virginia that Jefferson’s manager had been able to match the plantation’s agricultural income by hiring out slaves while Jefferson was in Paris. Jefferson’s eye had caught this profit in the accounts; he had written to Lewis in 1786: “Would it be better to hire more?”11

  Again and again the sale, the hiring, or the mortgaging of black souls rescued the Jeffersons from a bad harvest, bought time from the debt collectors, and kept the family afloat while a new and grander version of Monticello took shape. Meanwhile, Jefferson embarked on other costly projects he could not afford without slave labor. Yet Jefferson, his children, and his grandchildren forever referred to these slaves as a burden, and historians have sympathetically echoed their complaints, writing that Jefferson was “trapped” or “entangled” in a system he hated.

  The slaves formed Jefferson’s bulwark against catastrophe. While he was in France, he ordered the sale of 31 people, from which he netted £2,300. He sold another 30 slaves in 1791, 13 more in 1792, and 9 in the next two years. “Finding it necessary to sell a few more slaves to [pay down] the debt of mr Wayles…I have thought of disposing of Dinah & her family,” he wrote to his brother.12 Between 1784 and 1794 he sold or gave away 160 people. But the community constantly replenished itself. In 1792 he calculated that the births of slave children produced capital at the rate of 4 percent per year: “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.” In the 1780s and 1790s the astounding total of 143 children were born into Jefferson’s possession.

  Jefferson had recrossed the ocean to Virginia with blueprints for the future of Monticello in his head, along with a startlingly modern business model. The economy was changing and he adapted. His vision for Monticello’s future depended on slaves in new ways.

  Actually, Jefferson had recrossed the ocean with a real blueprint—his design for an ingenious new plow blade “of least resistance” that cut and turned the earth more efficiently, requiring less force than the plows he had studied in Europe.13 Simple in its design, the blade could be fabricated on the farm “by the coarsest workman.” With this tool, “mathematically demonstrated to be perfect,” he would remake his farming enterprise. “The plough is to the farmer what the wand is to the sorcerer. Its effect is really like sorcery.”14

  A species of sorcery is what he had in mind. We still hear it said that because tobacco was creating a ruined landscape of washed-out gullies, slavery would have died off peacefully if Eli Whitney had not invented his cotton gin and made fresh work for millions of enslaved black hands. But before the reign of King Cotton there was the regency of Prince Wheat. Jefferson arrived in Virginia with a plan to shift away from growing tobacco, whose cultivation he described as “a culture of infinite wretchedness.” Tobacco wore out the soil so fast that new acreage constantly had to be cleared, engrossing so much land that food could not be raised to feed the workers, requiring planters to purchase rations for the slaves.15

  The cultivation of wheat revitalized the plantation economy and reshaped the South’s agricultural landscape. Planters all over the Chesapeake region had been making the shift. (George Washington had begun raising grains some thirty years earlier because his land wore out faster than Jefferson’s did.) Jefferson continued to plant some tobacco because it remained an important cash crop, but his vision for wheat farming was rapturous: “The cultivation of wheat is the reverse [of tobacco] in every circumstance. Besides cloathing the earth with herbage, and preserving its fertility, it feeds the labourers plentifully, requires from them only a moderate toil, except in the season of harvest, raises great numbers of animals for food and service, and diffuses plenty and happiness among the whole.”

  The machine age had arrived, promising a transformation of agriculture, and Jefferson took a keen interest in the latest innovations. In August 1791, while serving as George Washington’s secretary of state, he visited a farm outside Philadelphia to inspect a newly invented threshing machine (the president went with him for a look).16 Later in that decade he ordered models of several different designs, which he then modified himself, eventually putting three machines into operation at Monticello. Outside contractors built the machines, but he depended on slaves to operate and repair them, and that was the keystone of the new plantation system.

  Wheat farming forced changes in the relationship between planter and slave. Tobacco was raised by gangs of slaves all doing the same repetitive, backbreaking tasks under the direct, strict supervision of overseers. Wheat required a variety of skilled laborers, and Jefferson’s ambitious plans required a retrained workforce. When his slaves greeted him on his return, he saw not a mob of “simple minds” but a promising flock of potential millers, mechanics, carpenters, smiths, spinners, coopers, and plowmen and plow-women.

  Jefferson still needed a cohort of “labourers in the ground” to carry out the hardest tasks, so the Monticello slave community became more segmented and hierarc
hical. They were all slaves, but some slaves would be better than others. The majority remained laborers; above them were enslaved artisans (both male and female); above them were enslaved managers; above them was the household staff. The higher you stood in the hierarchy, the better clothes and food you got; you also lived literally on a higher plane, closer to the mountaintop. A small minority of slaves received pay, profit sharing, or what Jefferson called “gratuities,” while the lowest workers received only the barest rations and clothing. Difference bred resentment, especially toward the elite household staff.

  Planting wheat required fewer workers than tobacco, leaving a pool of field laborers available for specialized training. Jefferson embarked on a comprehensive program to modernize slavery, diversify it, and industrialize it. Monticello would have a nail factory, a textile factory, a short-lived tinsmithing operation, coopering, and charcoal-burning. He had ambitious plans for the mill and a canal to provide water-power for it.

  Training for this new organization began in childhood. Jefferson sketched out a plan in his Farm Book:

  children till 10. years old to serve as nurses.

  from 10. to 16. the boys make nails, the girls spin.

  at 16. go into the ground or learn trades.17

  Measuring and counting everything, Jefferson devised numerous expedients for saving money and labor and for maximizing productivity. He determined, for example, that he could feed the slaves on dried fish for half the cost of pork: “a barrel of fish, costing 7.D. goes as far with the laborers as 200. lb of pork 14.D.” He laid out housing to save labor: “Build the Negro houses near together that the fewer nurses may serve & that the children may be more easily attended to by the super-annuated women.”18 He put old people and the partially infirm to work, referring to the crew of gardeners as his “senile corps.” He exulted that his successful textile factory “only employs a few women, children and invalids who could do little in the farm.” He had a very broad definition of “invalids”: on the one hand, he specified that they should “work only when they are able,” but on the other hand he thought that “they will probably be equal to the hauling away the earth and forming it into a bank on the side next the river.”19