He knew the man. The attributes Randolph ascribed to him in the letter, a eulogy to a slave, were bravery, intrepidity, trustworthiness, resoluteness, and “despising pain and not knowing fear”—attributes not usually ascribed to African-Americans by people of Randolph’s class. The man had committed suicide after being whipped. Unable to bear the humiliation, he had lynched himself.
No one is to blame. “In this particular case both Master and overseer are humane men, and the latter of proven fortitude, as well as moral worth.” The enterprise is cruel, but no one stops it. The system is amoral and seems to run by itself, and it functions, perversely, under a veneer of humanity and moral worth. The blame is nowhere, but it is everywhere; people live as if in a miasma. In his haunted mood Randolph writes of a “sooty atmosphere,” an extraordinary, Melvillean metaphor of filthy, choking air that stinks of corruption. It is the air of hell, and Randolph was breathing it in Virginia. But one gets used to it, especially when you are utterly dependent on making the machine work, as Randolph was.
When Jefferson told the duke that he animated slaves with rewards, he was fabricating an illusion for his visitor and perhaps for himself. In the first place, he was speaking of a very small number of people. Only a very small minority of the slaves received a share of profits and what Jefferson called “gratuities.” The rest were animated by fear of the overseers. And La Rochefoucauld was not shown everything on his tour of inspection. The system had a less tranquil operation just across the Rivanna River at the farm where Jefferson’s overseer William Page was acquiring a reputation as a “terror” with free use of the whip to maintain productivity.
The favored slaves, whom the duke did see, labored so industriously because they were desperate to remain in the master’s favor, to stay on the mountaintop and not be sent below, where the overseers were in charge. Amelioration did not trickle down. Writing about a girl who was not performing well in the textile mill, Jefferson said, “I have given her notice that she shall have some days trial more, and if there be no improvement, she must cease to spoil more cloth and go out to work with the overseer.”2
Perhaps the master’s greatest power was his control over family life. It was Jefferson’s general policy to keep families together, partly because he did have feelings of humanity, though he sometimes referred to the marriages among slaves as “connections,” which he thought were rather easily broken. Keeping families intact was also in his interest: “Certainly there is nothing I desire so much as that all the young people in the estate should intermarry with one another and stay at home. They are worth a great deal more in that case than when they have husbands and wives abroad” (meaning on another plantation and owned by someone else).3 Housing, food, clothing, work assignments, family unity—all benefits flowed from the master. But to receive these benefits, one must stand in the master’s favor, encouraging a permanent posture of dependence and gratitude.
When the duke inspected the Mulberry Row nail factory, he saw twenty-year-old Isaac Granger pounding hard at a forge, setting an example of efficiency for the younger nail boys. Granger belonged to one of Monticello’s leading families. His father and brother, both managers, were crucial gears in the Monticello machine, men who stood in Jefferson’s favor. Isaac left a memoir in which he calls Jefferson “a mighty good master,” an assessment that has echoed through the Jefferson biographies.4 But the blacksmith left many things out.
For some thirty years Jefferson depended on the Grangers to help him run Monticello. The Grangers owed Jefferson a very deep debt. As mentioned earlier, they were separated after John Wayles’s death and would never have seen each other again had Jefferson not reunited them at Monticello through two costly purchases. When Jefferson was in France and ordered his manager, Nicholas Lewis, to hire out slaves—which put the slaves at great risk of mistreatment—he specifically exempted the Grangers along with the Hemingses: “Great George, Ursula, Betty Hemings not to be hired at all.”*5 And when Jefferson rented a farm to the cruel overseer William Page, he first moved Great George’s son Bagwell and his family away from the place.
Jefferson sized up the Grangers as accomplished, loyal, hardworking people. Great George could read and write. They possessed skills in high demand that would have allowed them to support themselves in Virginia or elsewhere. As individuals and as a family, they were perfect candidates for the citizenship Jefferson spoke of in his pledge to train slaves for freedom. But they were also perfect candidates for high-ranking positions in the Monticello establishment.
When Jefferson returned from France, he spent less than a year at Monticello, having been summoned to serve as secretary of state by President Washington. Before he left, he placed direct management of the mountaintop farm in the hands of Great George, under the loose supervision of Colonel Randolph, who would be residing at Monticello in Jefferson’s absence. Before he left for Philadelphia in the fall of 1790, Jefferson walked around Monticello with Granger and gave him instructions about what he wanted built for the Randolphs. As he put it in a memo for Colonel Randolph: “A wash house…to be built and placed where I pointed out to George…. A stable to be built…where I have pointed out to George.”6 He expressed the highest confidence in Granger: “George…will be sufficient to see that the work is done, and to take all details off of your hands.”7
Jefferson appointed Great George the foreman of laborers at Monticello, sought his advice on crops and livestock, and paid him £20 a year, which was much less than the wages of white overseers. He paid £35 a year and five hundred pounds of pork to William Page.8 As farm manager, Granger had good years and bad. One season he brought in a harvest that Jefferson judged “extraordinary.” Jefferson made the Grangers, the father and later a son, buffers between himself and the workforce that labored at the forges and “in the ground.” Jefferson told Colonel Randolph to exempt Granger from the lowest tasks: “I consider George as their foreman, and should not require him to lay his hand to the hardest work.”9
As early as 1774, Jefferson had recognized the qualities of the oldest Granger son, also named George, and made him an apprentice to a hired white blacksmith. After two years “Smith” George, as he became known, took over the forge, saving Jefferson the expense of the hired white man. Smith George ran the Monticello blacksmith shop for more than fifteen years.10 Jefferson also put him in charge of the nailery. When Jefferson was away, Colonel Randolph reported, “I scarcely look to the Nailery at all—George I am sure could not stoop to my authority & I hope and believe he pushes your interests as well as I could.”11
The Grangers were the beneficiaries and victims of Jefferson’s long-term planning. Too important to release, four generations of Grangers served Jefferson in skilled positions. Multigenerational service of one family to another was not unusual in the plantation world and imparted the feeling that the institution of slavery had some relationship to eternity.
The manuscript of Isaac Granger’s memoir, along with a daguerreotype portrait of him, came to light only in the 1940s. The twenty-four-page, handwritten document had been set down by a white historian, Charles Campbell, who had sought out the blacksmith in the 1840s and spoke with him at some length about his experiences. Then in his seventies, Isaac was a free man living in Petersburg, Virginia. The daguerreotype shows a robust, well-muscled man wearing a white work shirt and a leather apron—apparently, the blacksmith was still working. Campbell described him as “rather tall, of strong frame, stoops a little, in color ebony; sensible, intelligent, pleasant.”12 It is not entirely clear how the blacksmith got to Petersburg as a free or semi-free man.
The blacksmith’s memoir conveys snippets of conversation with Jefferson and verbal snapshots of Jefferson and daily life on the mountain. Isaac got to know his master rather well, it seems, and Jefferson, who had an instinctive affinity with artisans, seemed to take a liking to him. With Isaac as his helper, Jefferson tinkered at various projects in a small metalworking shop. As a young boy, Isaac had learned to be an adept for
geman, a maker of fire. He told of crawling into a “great big bake oven” in Williamsburg, where he worked as a boy of six or seven years old: “Isaac would go into the oven and make fire…. Isaac used to go way into the oven.”13 (Throughout the account Isaac refers to himself in the third person.) The baker who hired him commended his skills to Jefferson: “This is the boy that made fire for me.”14
As a workingman, Isaac made a point of giving credit to other laborers, both white and black, even if no one might be interested in hearing it. He did it instinctively: “Mr. Jefferson came down to Williamsburg in a phaeton made by Davy Watson. Billy Ore did the ironwork.”15 With Isaac’s help Jefferson fabricated small metal items he needed around the house: “My Old Master was neat a hand as ever you see to make keys and locks and small chains, iron and brass. He kept all kind of blacksmith and carpenter tools in a great case.”16
Isaac’s father could read and write, so young Isaac had a sense of the power of literacy, took note of Jefferson’s machine for copying his writings, and was impressed by the “abundance of books” heaped and strewn on the floor of the study—“sometimes would have twenty of ’em down on the floor at once.” He recalled that whenever someone asked Jefferson a question, “he go right straight to the book and tell you all about it.”17 One wonders if Isaac himself put any questions to the master. The vividness of Isaac’s recollections suggests that he spent a surprising amount of time in Jefferson’s presence. He noticed when Jefferson began to wear glasses and recalled when Jefferson had a swelling in his legs which made walking so difficult that he and John Hemmings would have to roll the master around the farm on a wheelbarrow. He noted that Jefferson sang when he went about his fields and that his master “bowed to everybody he meet; talked with his arms folded.” Interestingly, this was a posture of authority. The polite way to present oneself to equals was with arms hanging loosely at one’s side with the forearms very slightly raised. Formal eighteenth-century men’s clothing was tailored to hold the arms in this position. Isaac was describing a gentleman’s manner of presenting himself to people he regarded as his inferiors.18
Isaac went along as a servant on Jefferson’s hunts for partridge and hare, noting with approval that his master would never shoot game that was sitting, “would give ’em a chance for thar life.” Isaac gazed in wonder at the dramatic beauty of the landscape surrounding the mountaintop, leaving a word portrait of Monticello that is remarkably like Jefferson’s well-known comment on seeing weather fabricated at his feet: “From Monticello you can see mountains all around as far as the eye can reach; sometimes see it rainin’ down this course and the sun shining over the tops of the clouds.”19 He remembered the portraits Jefferson had in the parlor, including “pictures of Ginral Washington and Marcus Lafayette.” Granger had actually met Lafayette—“saw him fust in the old war in the mountain with Old Master.” Later, when Isaac was living in Petersburg, he went to see Lafayette on his triumphal visit to Richmond in 1824. He walked right up to the hero “and talked with him and made him sensible [reminded him] when he fust saw him in the old war.”20
Granger vividly recalled Monticello as a place of music, that Jefferson “kept three fiddles” and that he “fiddled in the parlor” in the afternoon and evening. He heard one of the daughters playing the spinet and tried to chat up the Frenchmen who came to tune the fortepiano: “Isaac never could git acquainted with them; could hardly larn their names.” He recalled his master constantly singing as he rode or walked around the plantation—“hardly see him anywhar outdoors but what he was a-singin’. Had a fine clear voice.”21 As night fell, a different voice could be heard—that of Isaac’s mother, Ursula, singing the Randolph children to sleep.
Isaac’s story of the courtship of Polly Jefferson* is one of the most charming and touching scenes of Monticello life that we have. Told in deft, almost cinematic strokes, the anecdote reveals the emotional connection slaves felt for their young masters and mistresses:
Billy Giles courted Miss Polly, Old Master’s daughter. Isaac one morning saw him talking to her in the garden, right back of the nail factory shop; she was lookin on de ground. All at once she wheeled round and come off. That was the time she turned him off. Isaac never so sorry for a man in all his life—sorry because everybody thought that she was going to marry him. Mr. Giles give several dollars to the servants, and when he went away dat time he never come back no more. His servant Arthur was a big man. Isaac wanted Mr. Giles to marry Miss Polly. Arthur always said that he was a mighty fine man.22
We can picture the servants, clustered behind buildings, peering from cabin doors, tenderly observing this sweet scene. But between the lines there is another story: as he watched this scene unfold, Isaac may have been wondering, Is this the man who will own me? Isaac had been earmarked as part of Polly’s dowry, so when she married, he would become the property of Polly’s husband. Isaac quietly approached Giles’s valet, Arthur, the “big man.” He asked about the character of his master and was assured that Giles was “mighty fine.” But now Isaac would have to wait longer to see what kind of master Polly’s romantic inclinations would bring him. It could be someone “mighty fine” like Giles, or more like another visitor to Monticello, a man of habitual, instinctive cruelty.
As a boy, Isaac had frequent, unpleasant encounters with a friend of Jefferson’s who often stopped at Monticello, Colonel Archibald Cary, “as dry a looking man as ever you see in your life. He has given Isaac more whippings than he has fingers and toes.” When Cary visited Monticello, it was Isaac’s job to stand by the plantation’s gate to open it the second the colonel appeared. As Cary made his way along the circuitous roads that looped up the mountain, Isaac would run straight uphill to open two more gates so that the colonel would not have to stop or even pause. “Whenever Isaac missed opening them gates in time, the Colonel soon as he git to the house [would] look about for him and whip him with his horse-whip…. Colonel Cary made freer at Monticello than he did at home; whip anybody.”23 The colonel could do whatever he wanted, and no one stopped him. A small boy being horsewhipped by a visitor was just part of the background of the bustling plantation scene, like the tiny figure of Icarus fallen from the sky in Brueghel’s panorama of Dutch life. Evidently, Jefferson made no effort to persuade Cary to cease. To compensate, Cary distributed very generous tips.
Isaac had been a diligent worker from the time he was a small child, working alongside his mother in the kitchen and laundry—“toted wood for her, made fire, and so on”—and arising before dawn to build a fire in the room where the white children had their lessons.24 When Jefferson left for Philadelphia in the fall of 1790, he took the fifteen-year-old boy with him to learn tinsmithing, with the idea of setting up a tinning shop at Monticello to produce and sell utensils. Jefferson bound the teenager as an apprentice to an ironmonger whom Isaac described as “a short, mighty small, neat-made man; treated Isaac very well.” The first week he learned to cut and solder tin and began making “little pepper boxes and graters and sich, out of scraps of tin, so as not to waste any…. Then to making cups.” Isaac lived with the ironmonger and visited Jefferson on Sundays to report his progress: “Old Master used to talk to me mighty free and ax me, ‘How you come on Isaac, larnin de tin business?’”25 It seems that it never occurred to Isaac that he could escape slavery in Philadelphia.
Soon Isaac was taking three or four cups to show his master every Sunday, and eventually he was turning out four dozen pint cups a day and had learned to tin copper and sheet iron. Finally, Jefferson pronounced himself “mightily pleased” and told Isaac it was time to go back to Virginia and start the Monticello tin business, which lasted but a short time; so Isaac went to work in the nailery under his brother Smith George. The brothers worked so hard and so devotedly that Jefferson paid them £32 in 1795. The next year Jefferson paid Smith George $42, a 6 percent commission on the nailery’s profits.26 By then Isaac had a wife and two small children to support, so after a full day at the nailery he put in extra hours
by night at the blacksmith shop, hammering out lengths of chain, for which Jefferson paid him a penny and a half apiece.
In his memoir Isaac describes the incentives Jefferson offered the nailers: “Gave the boys in the nail factory a pound of meat a week, a dozen herrings, a quart of molasses, and peck of meal. Give them that wukked the best a suit of red or blue; encouraged them mightily.”27 Not all the slaves felt so mightily encouraged. It was Great George Granger’s job, as foreman, to get those people to work. Without molasses and suits to offer, he had to rely on persuasion, in all its forms. For years he had been very successful—by what methods, we don’t know. But in the winter of 1798 the system ground to a halt when Granger, perhaps for the first time, refused to whip people.
Colonel Randolph reported to Jefferson, then living in Philadelphia as vice president, that “insubordination” had “greatly clogged” operations under Granger.28 A month later there was “progress,” but Granger was “absolutely wasting with care.”29 He was caught between his own people and Jefferson, who had rescued his family, given him a good job, allowed him to earn money and own property, and shown similar benevolence to Granger’s children. Now Jefferson had his eye on Granger’s output.
Jefferson noted curtly in a letter to Randolph that another overseer had already delivered his tobacco to the Richmond market, “where I hope George’s will soon join it.”30 Randolph reported back that Granger’s people had not even packed the tobacco yet but gently urged his father-in-law to have patience with the foreman: “He is not careless…tho’ he procrastinates too much.”31 It seems that Randolph was trying to protect Granger from Jefferson’s wrath. George was not procrastinating; he was struggling against a workforce that resisted him. But he would not beat them, and they knew it.
At length, Randolph had to admit the truth to Jefferson. Granger, he wrote, “cannot command his force.” The only recourse was the whip. Randolph reported “instances of disobedience so gross that I am obliged to interfere and have them punished myself.”32 Randolph would not have administered the whip personally; they had professionals for that. Most likely he called in William Page, the white overseer who ran Jefferson’s farms across the river, the man notorious for his cruelty.
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 12
