Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  A stunning catastrophe started to unfold in the autumn of 1798 when Smith George began to show signs of a serious ailment, “a constant puking, shortness of breath and swelling first in the legs but now extending itself.”33 He sought out a black healer who lived twenty miles to the south in Buckingham County.34 Jefferson, though always very wary of physicians, paid for the treatment. George died in June 1799, marking the start of a mysterious cluster of deaths among Monticello slaves who managed other slaves.

  In December of that year, Jefferson set out from Monticello for a journey to Philadelphia; he planned to travel on horseback with a servant to Fredericksburg, where he would board a stage to the North. Despite illness, his attendant Jupiter insisted on riding with him as was customary, pronouncing himself much disturbed that his master was going to use another servant. He feared losing his place at Jefferson’s side, just as many years earlier he had been replaced by a Hemings as Jefferson’s personal valet. But after a day of winter traveling it was clear to Jefferson that Jupiter was very ill; he urged his man to return home, but Jupiter would not hear of it. He made it to Fredericksburg, then returned to Monticello, worn out by the trip. Jefferson’s daughter Patsy wrote to her father that Jupiter “conceived himself poisoned.”35

  Jupiter went to see the same healer who had treated Smith George. He gave Jupiter a mixture that, he said, “would kill or cure.” After taking the dose, Jupiter “fell down in a strong convulsion fit which lasted from ten to eleven hours, during which time it took three stout men to hold him. He languished nine days but was never heard to speak from the first of his being seized to the moment of his death.”36

  Then Great George and Ursula began showing signs of the same ailment that had carried off their son Smith George. The illness seemed to wax and wane, and Granger carried on as best he could. One day he was working as usual; the next day he was dead. Not long afterward, Ursula rapidly declined. Alarmed, Patsy wrote, “Ursula is I fear going in the same manner with her husband and son.” Jefferson responded with concern and perplexity: “the state of Ursula is remarkable. The symptoms & progress of her disease are well worthy [of] attention. That a whole family should go off in the same and so singular a way is a problem of difficulty.” There was some optimism in April 1800, when Colonel Randolph reported, “Ursula is better tho still confined in bed & greatly swelled,” but Ursula succumbed.37

  It is impossible to know with certainty what caused this “singular” cluster of fatalities, but the similarity of symptoms suggests a common cause. It could have been something as simple as chronic lead poisoning, brought on by cooking in a pot containing lead, which caused untreatable kidney failure. When I described the symptoms to a physician, he replied that kidney failure “would cause all those symptoms in the terminal phase.”38

  Or the Grangers were poisoned. The Monticello historian Lucia Stanton took note of Jupiter’s remark that he “conceived himself poisoned.” The immediate cause of his fatal seizure was the “medicine” given him by the country healer, but he had been seriously ill for days before receiving the fatal dose. Stanton suspected that Jupiter might have been right. All the deceased held positions of high status at Monticello. Great George and Smith George were bosses in the field, the nailery, and the forge. Jupiter ran the stable and had at least one run-in with another slave. And poison was the weapon of choice for settling scores on plantations. A Monticello slave later tried to poison an overseer, and a slave at Poplar Forest was accused of poisoning other slaves. The favors and power bestowed on Jupiter and the Grangers might have made them targets of jealousy and resentment, and they paid with their lives.39

  Isaac constructed a history he could live with, and he could do that only by leaving some things out. He had very kind words for Colonel Randolph: “Treated Isaac mighty well—one of the finest masters in Virginia.” 40 With that pronouncement Isaac truly reached the limit of what could be safely or comfortably said. Only when you look at the record do you find what the blacksmith left out: Colonel Randolph, desperate for cash, sold Isaac’s daughter Maria, who was taken away to Kentucky and probably never seen again. Why would he leave that out? Perhaps he did not wish to share a painful story with a white man, or perhaps he did tell it and Campbell left it out. Perhaps it was just unremarkable. People got sold all the time; it was the system, the sooty air, a filthy gust that snatched your Maria, and you can’t blame a wind that has no soul.

  8

  What the Colonel Saw

  Throughout Jefferson’s plantation records there runs a thread of indicators—some direct, some oblique, some euphemistic—that the Monticello machine operated on carefully calibrated violence. Some people would never readily submit to being slaves. Some people, Jefferson wrote, “require a vigour of discipline to make them do reasonable work.”1 That plain statement of his policy has been largely ignored in preference to Jefferson’s well-known self-exoneration: “I love industry and abhor severity.”2 Jefferson made that reassuring remark to a neighbor, but he might as well have been talking to himself. He hated conflict, disliked having to punish people, and found ways to distance himself from the violence his system required. He was the owner, but nothing was his fault. Thus he went on record with a denunciation of overseers as “the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race,” men of “pride, insolence and spirit of domination.”3 Though he despised these brutes, they were hardhanded men who got things done and had no misgivings. He hired them, issued orders to impose a vigor of discipline, and then spread a fog of denial over the whole business.

  In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had denounced violence against slaves, which he had good reason to hate because he had seen too much of it. A woman named Hannah, whom Jefferson knew, was beaten to death in “a cruel whipping” by an overseer at his brother’s plantation.4 He wrote the vivid description in Notes of someone, probably his father, beating a slave. As a boy, he witnessed other scenes he did not describe; the historian Susan Kern has found an advertisement taken out by Jefferson’s father for a runaway named Robin who “had on his Neck when he went away an Iron Collar.”5 A modern reader might think this was some item of adornment, but the collar was very different. A Civil War soldier described one of these infernal devices, which he removed from a man’s neck: “On either side of the collar was riveted a spike about four inches long, so arranged that one of the spikes stuck up behind each ear, and held the head as in a vice. Any attempt to turn the head ever so slightly resulted in a prod from one of these spikes.”6

  Small wonder that Jefferson called slavery “unremitting despotism,” having witnessed his father’s overseer, or his father himself, collaring a slave. But from his post in France, Jefferson ordered his manager to elicit “extraordinary exertions,” and the manager’s expense accounts in 1791 include a line item for the purchase of “collars.”7

  In the first decade of his ownership of Monticello, Jefferson leased farms for three years to Thomas Garth, whom he characterized as “excessively severe.” When Garth’s lease expired in 1775, Jefferson nevertheless hired him as overseer of all his holdings in Albemarle County. Garth set a standard of cruelty Jefferson did not want to see matched: when he evaluated potential overseers some thirty years later, he rejected one candidate because the man “has been brought up in the school of the Garths…his severity puts him out of the question.”8

  From 1790 until 1803, Colonel Randolph acted as Monticello’s “executive overseer,” supervising a series of overseers when Jefferson’s public duties took him away from Monticello for months at a time. Like George Washington, Jefferson ran a country and a plantation simultaneously. Both issued highly detailed orders from a distance to their plantation managers. Both possessed virtually photographic memories of their properties by the square foot, held agricultural calendars in their heads, and could summon clear mental images of the work that needed to be done, precisely where and how it needed to be done, and by whom. Both felt seized by anxiety that as they labored in the capital for the publi
c good, their personal substance was draining away at home. Both commanded their managers to maintain production.

  When Nicholas Lewis left Monticello in 1792, Jefferson and Colonel Randolph exchanged letters about choosing his replacement. Their discussion suggests that both men knew that harsh treatment had been the standard under Lewis’s command and that they hoped for improvement. Randolph proposed hiring a man named Manoah Clarkson because he thought he combined “Goodness” with “firmness and vigor.” After Clarkson had worked for a while, Randolph reported, “The skill and activity of Clarkson are sufficiently manifested allready to make us hope that your affairs in Albemarle will be better conducted than they have ever been. I know it will give you real pleasure to hear that he has a valuable art of governing the slaves which sets aside the necessity of punishment allmost entirely. Contentment reigns among them.”9 Jefferson shared Randolph’s optimism: “Your account of Clarkson’s conduct gives me great pleasure.”10

  In his response to Randolph, Jefferson also wrote, “My first wish is that the labourers may be well treated.”11 But what appears at first glance to be an ironclad declaration of principle turns out to be just what Jefferson said it was, a “wish,” and it was qualified by a second wish—“that they may enable me to have that treatment continued by making as much as will admit it.”

  This seemingly simple statement contains an enormous amount of information. First, this was Jefferson’s contract with the slaves: I wish to treat you well, but if you do not produce enough, there will be harsh measures. As with his earlier unspoken compacts, the slaves had no idea that this governing principle had been declared, although they could certainly sense its effects.

  Second, it was Jefferson’s contract with himself. Having made this mental compact with the slaves, he could absolve himself from blame for anything unpleasant. The slaves were at fault.

  Third, we get a flickering, on-and-off sighting of Jefferson the man. The benevolent paterfamilias is dominant, but in the background stands a darker figure, harder to discern, emerging only briefly in flares of wrath, which we instinctively discount because it does not fit with the image we want to have.

  Fourth, these were standing orders to the hapless son-in-law charged with managing the unmanageable—barely controllable overseers and laborers who resisted control. The heir of ruinous debts, Randolph depended on Jefferson’s largesse to survive, and his wife was utterly devoted to her father. Randolph had no explicit authority over the overseers, but he was the owner’s son-in-law; Jefferson told the overseers to ask him for advice, but Randolph should not intervene except in “extremities.”

  Randolph’s letters, generally a model of clarity and erudition (he attended college in Edinburgh), sometimes degenerate to gibberish when he is forced to discuss the disciplining of slaves with his father-in-law, as if he were stammering in front of the commander in chief. In a garbled sentence that takes several readings to untangle, Randolph described his peculiar position as middleman in a chain of command as tangled as his syntax: “I have been frequently called on and have not hezitated to interfere tho’ without authority I have made known to all I had none that my interference if not productive of wholesome effects might be rejected.”

  One letter to Jefferson abruptly opens with a declaration of loyalty and then an ambiguous hint that some overseer, unnamed, has crossed the line into severity, what Randolph calls euphemistically “strict command.” Randolph would like to put a stop to something unspecified, but he thinks that strict command (“the motives upon which you depended”) is what his father-in-law wants, and a change in policy presents risks. Oblique and obscure, the account apparently made sense both to Randolph and to Jefferson: “I am confident I could have served you considerably but I thought it better to trust to the motives upon which you depended than risk the consequences of a sudden relaxation of strict command.”12

  A point-counterpoint runs through Randolph’s reports to Jefferson in the winter of 1798, when output sagged at the precise moment when Jefferson was urging speed. Jefferson had sent instructions that “George should be hurried to get his tobacco down. I have never learned whether he & Page have delivered all their wheat & how much.”13 This was the season in which the enslaved foreman Great George Granger faced insubordination and wasted away with care because he was too lenient, while the harsh regime of the “terror” William Page provoked “discontent.” Randolph told Jefferson that Page was “peevish & too ready to strike.”14 But Jefferson had known Page’s temperament when he hired him and had taken the precaution of removing Granger’s son Bagwell and his family from the farm Page would manage; he had a cabin hastily constructed for them on the Monticello farm, where Bagwell would be under his father’s supervision.15 When he received the report of insubordination under one manager and discontent under the other, Jefferson loftily advised Randolph that “George needs to be supported & Page to be moderated,” but offered no advice on how that might be achieved, and later remarked, vaguely, “I am in hopes that Page & George will give you but little trouble.”16 In any event, output had to be maintained; he had his eye on delivery dates to the Richmond market.

  “I am not fit to be a farmer with the kind of labour we have,” Jefferson exclaimed in 1799, in an oft-quoted diatribe against the uselessness of slaves, suggesting a heroic struggle on his part to wring productivity out of them.17 He was chief scribe in the propaganda war against African-American laborers. Despite their difficulties, Granger and Page managed to produce an excellent crop of tobacco, which Jefferson had resumed planting. Several years earlier he had exulted: “We have had the finest harvest ever known in this country. Both the quantity and quality of wheat are extraordinary.”18 He had the slaves to thank for this, the weather to blame for other problems—drought and frost destroyed the next wheat crop—and only himself to blame for the setback that inspired his outburst against the laborers. As one historian discovered, “Although the American economy was in trouble in 1798, Jefferson had a particularly good year, selling his tobacco in Richmond for $13 a hundred weight.”19 He did so well that he was able to pay off $2,000 in back debts and, because the economy was slack, to hire, at a bargain rate, a top-quality house joiner in Philadelphia, James Dinsmore, who went on to complete Monticello. He also bought his daughter a Kirchmann harpsichord, one of the finest and most expensive brands.

  In 1799 he had plenty of tobacco to sell, but he bet against the market, holding back from selling in the certainty that commodity prices would rise. The market fell. By the time he decided to sell, he got only $6 a hundredweight. And when he wrote his blast against the slaves and their useless labor, the market was in free fall—not their fault, but someone had to take the blame for his embarrassment and bear the burden of repairing the damage wrought by a ruthless market.

  The physical punishment of slaves presented a potential embarrassment to the plantation world and to Jefferson. When a British poet wanted to mock Jefferson, he composed a verse saying, “The patriot…retires to lash his slaves at home.” During his presidency Jefferson received an anonymous letter about a report circulating in Washington that he had been seen at Monticello personally lashing a female slave. The charge was most likely baseless, but even the hint of such an incident could stain Jefferson’s reputation.20

  Among themselves, the planters expected and accepted a certain level of violence, but there were limits. When the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt visited Monticello, he learned of a commotion among the planters about a heinous act by one of their own:

  I witnessed the indignation excited in all the planters of the neighborhood by the cruel conduct of a master to his slave, whom he had flogged to such a degree as to leave him almost dead on the spot. Justice pursues this barbarous master, and all the other planters declared loudly their wish, that he may be severely punished, which seems not to admit of any doubt.21

  Jefferson’s man William Page evoked the same disgust. His methods of control at Jefferson’s farms unnerved the whole county. I
n the judgment of Albemarle’s white citizens, Page was a “terror.” Though Colonel Randolph told Jefferson about the slaves’ “discontent” with Page’s free use of the lash, Jefferson retained the peevish overseer’s services for another two years.22 Jefferson’s other son-in-law, John Wayles Eppes, alluded to “the publick sentiment against him.” Making his own deal with the devil, Eppes hired Page, balancing the overseer’s known cruelty against “his skill and industry.” But when Eppes sought to hire slaves from other Albemarle planters, nobody would do business with him: “the terror of Page’s name…prevented the possibility of hiring them.”23

  A year after he hired Manoah Clarkson, Jefferson’s estimate of that overseer’s goodness had been deflated, though not to the degree that he would fire the man: “I shall perhaps propose [a project] to Clarkson…unless I could find a person more kind to the labourers.”24 Jefferson hired another violent overseer with an “unfortunate temper,” William McGehee—“to those under him he is harsh, severe and tyrannical,” so tyrannical that when McGehee was working on another plantation he had to carry a gun “for fear of an attack from the negroes.”25

  In the 1950s a tiny fragment of information about the Monticello system so shocked one of Jefferson’s editors that he suppressed it in the record. The standard source for our understanding of life at Monticello has been the edition of Jefferson’s Farm Book edited in the early 1950s by Edwin Betts, with a five-hundred-page compendium of letters and other documents describing in minute detail the day-to-day lives of master and slaves. When Betts was editing one of Colonel Randolph’s plantation reports, he confronted a taboo subject: Randolph reported to Jefferson that the nailery was functioning very well because “the small ones” were being whipped. Being ten, eleven, or twelve years old, they did not take willingly to being forced to show up in the icy midwinter hour before dawn at the master’s nail forge. And so the overseer, Gabriel Lilly, was whipping them “for truancy.”26