Tobacco required child labor (their small stature made children ideal workers for the distasteful task of plucking and killing tobacco worms); wheat did not, so Jefferson transferred his surplus of young workers to his nail factory (boys) and spinning and weaving operations (girls). He launched the nailery in 1794 and supervised it personally for three years. “I now employ a dozen little boys from 10. to 16. years of age, overlooking all the details of their business myself.”20 He said he spent half the day counting and measuring nails. In the morning he weighed and distributed nailrod to each nailer; at the end of the day he weighed the finished product and noted how much rod had been wasted.
The nailery “particularly suited me,” he wrote, “because it would employ a parcel of boys who would otherwise be idle.”21 Equally important, it served as a training and testing ground. All the nail boys got extra food; those who did well received a new suit of clothes, and they could also expect to graduate, as it were, to training as artisans rather than going “in the ground” as common field slaves. Some nail boys rose in the plantation hierarchy to become house servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, or coopers. Wormley Hughes, a slave who became head gardener, started in the nailery, as did Burwell Colbert, who rose to become the mansion’s butler and Jefferson’s personal attendant.22 Isaac Granger was the most productive nailer, with a profit averaging eighty cents a day over the first six months of 1796, when he was twenty; he fashioned half a ton of nails during those six months. The work was tedious in the extreme. Confined for long hours in the hot, smoky workshop, the boys hammered out five to ten thousand nails a day, producing a gross income of $2,000 in 1796. Jefferson’s competition for the nailery was the state penitentiary.23
The nailers received twice the food ration of a field worker but no wages. Jefferson paid white boys (an overseer’s sons) fifty cents a day for cutting wood to feed the nailery’s fires, but this was a weekend job done “on Saturdays, when they were not in school.” Jefferson’s grandchildren sometimes pitched in, as the overseer wrote, and worked with them “like little Turks on Saturdays, so that my boys could go with them a-fishing.”24
Exuberant over the success of the nailery, Jefferson wrote: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.”25 The profit was substantial. Just months after the factory began operation, he wrote that “a nailery which I have established with my own negro boys now provides completely for the maintenance of my family.”26 Two months of labor by the nail boys paid the entire annual grocery bill for the white family. He wrote to a Richmond merchant, “My groceries come to between 4. and 500 Dollars a year, taken and paid for quarterly. The best resource of quarterly paiment in my power is Nails, of which I make enough every fortnight to pay a quarter’s bill [emphasis added].”27 The success of the nail factory spurred him to develop other enterprises staffed by skilled slaves that brought in cash or made Monticello more self-sufficient.
He wrote out a plan for a harvest involving a small army of sixty-six laborers. His enslaved manager and blacksmith, Great George Granger, would ride behind the harvesters “with tools & a grindstone mounted in the single mule cart…constantly employed in mending cradles & grinding scythes. The same cart would carry about the liquor…. cradlers should work constantly.” Five of the “smallest boys” would be the gatherers, supervised by a “foreman,” who was one of the larger boys. Women and “abler boys” would bind the sheaves. There would be stackers, loaders, cooks, and carters; “the whole machine would move in exact equilibrio, no part of the force could be lessened without retarding the whole, nor increased without a waste of force.” He estimated that this force, fueled by four gallons of whiskey, would complete a harvest in six days.28
A foreign visitor in 1796, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, observed this human machine in operation and was deeply impressed. “I found him in the midst of the harvest from which the scorching heat of the sun does not prevent his attendance,” wrote the duke, who noted Jefferson’s all-encompassing attentiveness to plantation management: “He orders, directs and pursues, in the minutest detail, every branch of business.”29
Sharing Jefferson’s passion for innovative, scientific agriculture, the duke inspected the plantation with a practiced eye, noting with approval the treatment of the workers—“His negroes are nourished, clothed, and treated as well as white servants could be”—and observing with some astonishment that the blacks had mastered a multiplicity of skills: as “cabinet-makers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc.” He could not restrain his excitement.
The exhilaration in the duke’s account arises from his perception that a breakthrough had been achieved in a remarkably short time. He could see no trace of the racial inferiority Jefferson had described in Notes. The enslaved, who Jefferson had said in France were as simple and useless as children, were skilled, diligent workers motivated “by rewards and distinctions.” So the question inevitably arose: Is this the moment to set the people free?
Apparently not. The duke dutifully reports to his European readers Jefferson’s good intentions: “The generous and enlightened Mr. Jefferson cannot but demonstrate a desire to see these Negroes emancipated.”30 But then there is the thud of disappointment. In a tone of some bafflement La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt tries to explain why the demonstrable skills and good character of the enslaved are not sufficient, in Jefferson’s view, to gain them freedom: “He sees so many difficulties in their emancipation [and] he adds so many conditions to render it practicable, that it is thus reduced to the impossible.” Jefferson is determined to police the color line: “the Negroes of Virginia can only be emancipated all at once, and by exporting to a distance the whole black race. He bases his opinion on the certain danger, if there were nothing else, of seeing blood mixed without means of preventing it.”
At this point an air of unreality settles over the scene, for the race-mixing Jefferson claims to dread has already taken place. La Rochefoucauld could see for himself that Jefferson had staffed his household with mixed-race slaves “who have neither in their color nor features a single trace of their [African] origin.”31
The people of Monticello had more than fulfilled the conditions Jefferson had set down in a letter written in 1791 to the black mathematician-astronomer Benjamin Banneker:
No body wishes more than I do to see [proof] that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men…. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be.32
The roster of skills acquired by the Monticello slaves is remarkable. Historians have compiled a list of their occupations: plowmen and plow-women, gardeners, shepherds, millers, charcoal burners, sawyers, carpenters, joiners, cabinetmakers, wheelwrights, carriage makers, coopers, basket makers, blacksmiths, nail makers, tinsmiths, spinners, weavers, dyers, seamstresses and tailors, shoemakers, brickmakers and bricklayers, stonecutters and stonemasons, glaziers, plasterers, painters, roofers, launderers, cooks, dairy workers, brewers, soap makers, candlemakers, butlers, barbers and hairdressers, maids and valets, midwives, coachmen, hostlers, wagoners, and watermen.
The conversation of the duke and the Founder on that blazing June day at Monticello is an archetypal scene in Southern life—the visit to a plantation by an outsider who gazes and listens in increasing bafflement as the evidence of his eyes is contradicted by what he is told. Here Jefferson takes on the part of a universal figure—the master called upon to explain a central mystery of American life. With the diligence and skill of the slaves fully evident, Jefferson explains that despite what you see, these people are degraded and different and they have no place in our country. He establishes that slavery is mysterious, that on this borderland of races the master alone comprehends the processes taking place: dangerous primal struggles despite the apparent tranquillity.
Arguing with such a ma
n was futile. Tossing up so many difficulties, so many conditions, the master trumps the outsider with his esoteric knowledge of the race mystery. But like the duke, we must take a close, interrogating look at the systems Jefferson put into operation on his mountain. Indeed, there were processes invisible to the duke.
The people gathering the sheaves and sharpening the scythes in the hot sun of a Virginia afternoon were soon to be owned in Amsterdam. Jefferson was conducting negotiations with a Dutch merchant-banking house to finance the recapitalization of Monticello’s operations and the construction of its new mansion. The people La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt watched at work were about to become bundled and collateralized assets in an international banking transaction.
The deal was finalized in the solemn legal language of “Witnesseth” in a financial instrument between Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle in Virginia on the one part and Nicholas Van Staphorst, Jacob Van Staphorst, and Hubbard of Amsterdam in the United Netherlands, merchants and partner:
whereas the said Van Staphorsts & Hubbard have now lately and since the dates of the said deeds lent to the said Thomas the further sum of two thousand dollars…he hath given granted and conveyed unto the said Nicholas and Jacob Van Staphorsts & Hubbard all his right and equity of redemption in the said hundred and fifty negro slaves in full and absolute right and dominion.33
In his approach to the Dutch bankers, with whom he had had dealings in Europe, Jefferson reported that his estate was “much deteriorated” after his absences but that “an advance of from one to two thousand dollars would produce a state of productiveness.”34 Determined to fight off his debts, Jefferson bought time by selling people, and then he realized he could take on debt to expand, to acquire new machinery and erect a new house. He showed the plans to La Rochefoucauld, who thought “his house will certainly deserve to be ranked with the most pleasant mansions in France and England.”35 The Dutch bankers opened an equity line backed by Jefferson’s slaves for $2,000.36
It was around this time that Jefferson chided a neighbor who had suffered financial losses, saying he “should have been invested in negroes,” and urged the neighbor’s family to invest “every farthing” of their available cash “in land and negroes, which…bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.” The slaves had condemned themselves: the more skilled they became, the more valuable they became, and the more they tightened the chains of their enslavement.37 With the machine functioning in equilibrium, the owner would never dismantle it. Jefferson had also calculated that it was vastly cheaper to feed, house, and clothe a slave than hire a free white worker, if he could find one.38 Yet when questioned by an outsider about freeing slaves, a master never said they are too valuable; it was much easier to say they are like children.
The duke was present at a transitional moment in American history. Like many other planters in the South, Jefferson was trying to devise a “rational and humane” plan not to end slavery but to reshape it and bring it into the new republic as an acceptable, indeed respectable component of the economy and society. This is what slaveholders called “amelioration.” Traveling through the Chesapeake country at about this time, the Irishman Isaac Weld noted that slaveholders “have nearly everything they can want on their own estates. Amongst their slaves are found tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, turners, wheelwrights, weavers, tanners, etc.”39 Mainly a business plan, amelioration included a psychological component—persuading slaves that it was rational and humane for them to be enslaved. This is what Jefferson, Washington, and the other revolutionaries had most feared that the British would do to the white people of America: persuade them or trick them into submitting to a form of slavery that had invisible chains.40
The psychological underpinning of amelioration might be found, perversely, in the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s sources for it. Jefferson wrote of a fearful apparition, the sufferable evil, a concept he derived from John Locke’s observation that people “are more disposed to suffer than right themselves by resistance.” Jefferson re-wrote this in the Declaration as, “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The ameliorated version of slavery looks very much like the sufferable evil Jefferson warned of, clothed in “prevarications and artifices” masking a design to reduce the people “under absolute Despotism.” 41
The slaveholders were fashioning a transition from the system of slavery they had inherited, which Jefferson portrayed as a burdensome legacy bequeathed by the dead hand of the past, to a new, refined system of deliberate enslavement. With Virginia’s liberal manumission law of 1782 still on the books, owners could free their people at will, but that law was quietly gathering dust, a vestige of Revolutionary fervor now burning out. Very few planters relinquished their slaves, as Jefferson had predicted in Notes: “Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power they possess.”
Another outsider rose up. As if from the grave of the Revolution, a stalwart veteran of the cause, the Polish general Thaddeus Kosciuszko, called upon Jefferson for help in composing a last will and testament. The memory of what he had fought for was on his mind. Leaving America for Europe in 1798 to take up the cause of Polish independence, Kosciuszko wished to ensure that the long-delayed payment he had just received for his Revolutionary service in the American uniform would be put to a revolutionary use. Kosciuszko’s command of English was not perfect, so he asked Jefferson, in whom he had complete faith, to sit down with him to compose a will that would stand up in an American court. In preparation, Kosciuszko drafted the following document in his own hand, in imperfect English. It reads like a farewell address to America and Jefferson:
I beg Mr. Jefferson that in case I should die without will or testament he should bye out of my money so many Negroes and free them, that the [remaining] Sums should be sufficient to give them education and provide for their maintenance. that is to say each should know before, the duty of a cytysen in the free Government. that he must defend his Country against foreign as well internal Enemies…. to have good and human heart sensible for the sufferings of others. each must be married and have 100 ackres of land, wyth instruments. Catle for tillage, and know how to manage and Gouvern it as well as how to behave to neybourghs. always with kindness and ready to help them. Themselves frugal, to their Children give good education. I mean as to the heart and the duty to their Country.42
Kosciuszko had one request to make of the people he expected to free: “in gratitude to me to make themselves hapy as possible.”
The word to which every writer on slavery must eventually resort is “irony.” When Jefferson had gone to inspect the new threshing machine near Philadelphia, George Washington went with him. One irony is that Washington was turning in his mind plans for freeing his slaves, which he would eventually do in his will after his family had thwarted his earlier effort. On the issue of slavery, Jefferson emerges poorly in a side-by-side moral comparison with Washington, but in hindsight we can see which Founder more truly reflects the times and the character of the country. The public would little note, and did not long remember, Washington’s emancipation of his slaves. In hindsight, George Washington’s “inflexible” sense of justice and insistence on “a common bond of principle” seem antique, as dull and disapproving as his portrait on the dollar, when set beside the ingenuity, vision, and entrepreneurial energy on full display at Monticello. The future belonged to Jefferson.
7
What the Blacksmith Saw
When the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt toured Monticello in 1796, he was shown the industrious, apparently tranquil surface of a smoothly functioning system. But the duke saw right through it. What happened to your ideals? When will you free the people? Patiently, Jefferson explained to the duke that yes, the enterprise is patently unjust, but it is temporary. Soon we shall find a way to exile these people, and the
moral problem will be solved. In the meantime, the system works well, and no one seems to object. No slaves complain to the duke. The moral universe of the Revolution has been upended, yet everyone seems satisfied, so perhaps he is wrong to impose his values on this strange society.
And so La Rochefoucauld wrote an account of the “generous and enlightened” plantation master, which has echoed through the histories and biographies. His description of harvest time at Monticello is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Jefferson had been able to fashion a humane version of slavery. But what the duke saw was a carefully constructed illusion.
Rarely did plantation insiders break ranks and tell the truth about slavery, unless something deeply shocking jolted them into an awareness they had suppressed. After decades of managing Monticello for his father-in-law, managing his own farm at Edgehill, and observing slavery’s operation at its most enlightened and progressive, Colonel Randolph wrote a wrenching private letter saying that the whole “Southern system” was “a hideous monster” ruled by brutality and fear. The event that jolted Tom Randolph into writing this letter was the discovery of a man’s body dangling from a tree at a neighbor’s plantation near Monticello.1
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 11
