Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  Betts decided that the image of children being beaten at Monticello had to be suppressed, so he deleted the offending line from Randolph’s letter. He had an entirely different image in his head; the introduction to the book declared, “Jefferson came close to creating on his own plantations the ideal rural community.”27 Betts couldn’t do anything about the original letter, but no one would see it, tucked away in the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The full text did not emerge in print until 2005.

  Betts’s omission was important in shaping the scholarly consensus that Jefferson managed his plantations with a lenient hand. Relying on Betts’s editing, the historian Jack McLaughlin noted that Lilly “resorted to the whip during Jefferson’s absence, but Jefferson put a stop to it.”28 “Slavery was an evil he had to live with,” Merrill Peterson wrote, “and he managed it with what little dosings of humanity a diabolical system permitted.”29 Peterson echoed Jefferson’s complaints about the workforce, alluding to “the slackness of slave labor,” and emphasized Jefferson’s benevolence: “In the management of his slaves Jefferson encouraged diligence but was instinctively too lenient to demand it. By all accounts he was a kind and generous master. His conviction of the injustice of the institution strengthened his sense of obligation toward its victims.”30 Joseph Ellis observed that only “on rare occasions, and as a last resort, he ordered overseers to use the lash.” Dumas Malone stated, “Jefferson was kind to his servants to the point of indulgence, and within the framework of an institution he disliked he saw that they were well provided for. His ‘people’ were devoted to him.”31

  As a rule, the slaves who lived at the mountaintop, including the Hemings family and the Grangers, were treated better than the slaves who worked in the ground farther down the mountain. But the machine was hard to restrain.

  After the violent tenures of earlier overseers, Gabriel Lilly seemed to portend a gentler reign when he arrived at Monticello in 1800. Colonel Randolph’s first report was optimistic. “All goes well,” he wrote, and “what is under Lillie admirably.”32 His second report about two weeks later was glowing: “Lillie goes on with great spirit and complete quiet at Mont’o.: he is so good tempered that he can get twice as much done without the smallest discontent as some with the hardest driving possible.”33 In addition to placing him over the laborers “in the ground” at Monticello, Jefferson put Lilly in charge of the nailery for an extra fee of £10 a year.

  Once Lilly established himself, his good temper evidently evaporated, because Jefferson began to worry about what Lilly would do to the nailers, the promising adolescents whom Jefferson managed personally, intending to move them up the plantation ladder. He wrote to Randolph: “I forgot to ask the favor of you to speak to Lilly as to the treatment of the nailers. it would destroy their value in my estimation to degrade them in their own eyes by the whip. this therefore must not be resorted to but in extremities. as they will again be under my government, I would chuse they should retain the stimulus of character.” But in the same letter he emphasized that output must be maintained: “I hope Lilly keeps the small nailers engaged so as to supply our customers.”34

  Colonel Randolph immediately dispatched a reassuring but carefully worded reply: “Everything goes well at Mont’o.—the Nailers all [at] work and executing well some heavy orders…. I had given a charge of lenity respecting all: (Burwell* absolutely excepted from the whip alltogether) before you wrote: none have incurred it but the small ones for truancy.”35 To the news that the small ones were being whipped and that “lenity” had an elastic meaning, Jefferson had no response; the small ones had to be kept “engaged.”

  It seems that Jefferson grew uneasy about Lilly’s regime at the nailery. Jefferson replaced him with William Stewart but kept Lilly in charge of the adult crews building his mill and canal. Under Stewart’s lenient command (greatly softened by habitual drinking), the nailery’s productivity sank. The nail boys, favored or not, had to be brought to heel. In a very unusual letter, Jefferson told James Dinsmore that he was bringing Lilly back to the nailery. It might seem puzzling that Jefferson would feel compelled to explain a personnel decision that had nothing to do with Dinsmore, but the nailery stood just a few steps from Dinsmore’s shop. Jefferson was preparing Dinsmore to witness scenes under Lilly’s command such as he had not seen under Stewart’s, and his tone is stern: “I am quite at a loss about the nailboys remaining with mr Stewart. they have long been a dead expence instead of profit to me. in truth they require a vigour of discipline to make them do reasonable work, to which he cannot bring himself. on the whole I think it will be best for them also to be removed to mr Lilly’s [control].”36

  An incident of horrible violence in the nailery—an attack by one nail boy against another—may shed some light on the fear Lilly instilled in the nail boys. In 1803 a nailer named Cary smashed his hammer into the skull of a fellow nailer, Brown Colbert. Seized with convulsions, Colbert went into a coma and would certainly have died had Colonel Randolph not immediately summoned a physician, who performed brain surgery. With a trephine saw, the doctor drew back the broken part of Colbert’s skull, thus relieving pressure on the brain. Amazingly, the young man survived.

  Bad enough that Cary had so viciously attacked someone, but his victim was a Hemings. Jefferson angrily wrote to Randolph that “it will be necessary for me to make an example of him in terrorem to others, in order to maintain the police so rigorously necessary among the nail boys.”* He ordered that Cary be sold away “so distant as never more to be heard of among us. It would to the others be as if he were put out of the way by death.” And he alluded to the abyss beyond the gates of Monticello into which people could be flung: “There are generally negro purchasers from Georgia passing about the state.”

  Randolph’s report of the incident included Cary’s motive: the boy was “irritated at some little trick from Brown, who hid part of his nailrod to teaze him.” But under Lilly’s regime this trick was not so “little.” Colbert knew the rules, and he knew very well that if Cary couldn’t find his nailrod, he would fall behind, and under Lilly that meant a beating. Hence the furious attack.37

  Jefferson’s daughter wrote to her father that one of the slaves, a disobedient and disruptive man named John, tried to poison Lilly, perhaps hoping to kill him. John was safe from any severe punishment because he was a hired slave: if Lilly injured him, Jefferson would have to compensate his owner, so Lilly had no means to retaliate. John, evidently grasping the extent of his immunity, took every opportunity to undermine and provoke him, even “cutting up [Lilly’s] garden [and] destroying his things.”38

  But Lilly had his own kind of immunity. He grasped his importance to Jefferson when he renegotiated his contract, so that beginning in 1804 he would no longer receive a flat fee for managing the nailery but be paid 2 percent of the gross.39 Productivity immediately soared. In the spring of 1804, Jefferson wrote to his supplier: “The manager of my nailery had so increased its activity as to call for a larger supply of rod…than had heretofore been necessary.” 40

  Maintaining a high level of activity required a commensurate level of discipline. Thus, in the fall of 1804, when Lilly was informed that one of the nail boys was sick, he would have none of it. Appalled by what happened next, one of Monticello’s white workmen, a carpenter named James Oldham, informed Jefferson of “the Barbarity that [Lilly] made use of with Little Jimmy.” Oldham reported that James Hemings, the seventeen-year-old son of the house servant Critta Hemings, had been sick for three nights running, so sick that Oldham feared the boy might not live. He took Hemings into his own room to keep watch over him. When he told Lilly that Hemings was seriously ill, Lilly said he would whip Jimmy into working. Oldham “begged him not to punish him,” but “this had no effect.” The “Barbarity” ensued: Lilly “whipped him three times in one day, and the boy was really not able to raise his hand to his head.” 41

  Flogging to this degree does not persuade someone to work; it disables him. But it als
o sends a message to the other slaves, especially those, like Jimmy, who belonged to the elite class of Hemings servants and might think they were above the authority of Gabriel Lilly. Once he recovered, Jimmy Hemings fled Monticello, joining the community of free blacks and runaways who made a living as boatmen on the James River, floating up and down between Richmond and obscure backwater villages. Contacting Hemings through Oldham, Jefferson tried to persuade him to come home but did not set the slave catchers after him.42

  There is no record that Jefferson made any remonstrance against Lilly, who was unrepentant about the beating and the loss of a valuable slave; indeed, he demanded that his salary be doubled to £100. This put Jefferson in a quandary. He displayed no misgivings about the regime that Oldham characterized as “the most cruel,” but £100 was more than he wanted to pay. Jefferson wrote that Lilly as an overseer “is as good a one as can be”—“certainly I can never get a man who fulfills my purposes better than he does.” 43

  Years of watching people get whipped did not accustom Colonel Randolph to it. Rather, he grew to hate it. He banned the whip on his own place, Edgehill; and when people committed a serious offense, he took them to court, and they were punished by a stint in jail, like a white person. Occasionally, he took a cane to people, but there was something about the whip he could no longer abide, it being the emblem of a species of power no one should have because, he wrote, “power seldom reasons well”—a Jeffersonian notion if there ever was one. He evidently had words with his fellow planters over the question of whipping and the realpolitik of plantation management. Someone must have said to him: Well, they whip people in the army, and this is the same. Colonel Randolph didn’t think so. He had seen army discipline, and he wrote: “Tyranny in the army is mitigated by the reflexion that the brave have to submit to the brave only,” whereas on a plantation “the greatest dastard” held people “entirely in his power, and dependent upon his caprice.” 44

  Jefferson wrote that punishment degraded slaves “in their own eyes,” which made whipping counterproductive because it would “destroy their value.” 45 He was referring not to the laborers in the ground but to the high-ranking artisans and household servants. His new model of agriculture and industry required a measure of self-reliance (very carefully limited) on the part of these exceptionally important people. Jefferson wanted them to display “character,” but that emphatically did not mean having a sense of self-worth or self-esteem. Possessing “character” meant that you were manageable. The nailers “will again be under my government” when he returned to Monticello, and he wanted to deal with contented slaves. He certainly did not want to involve himself in any unpleasant business of punishment.

  If slaves could be convinced that it was in their interest to cooperate, to be good slaves, then Jefferson would not have them collared or whipped, and slavery would be a less distasteful business for everyone. This was part of Jefferson’s sinister fantasy that he was a benevolent master—sinister because he believed that by manipulating behavior with threats and rewards, he could get inside a person’s head and shape the “character.” He could make slavery congenial to the master by creating genial slaves suited to perpetual slavery. Alexis de Tocqueville later observed this process taking place across the South, writing that the slaveholders “have employed their despotism and their violence against the human mind.” 46

  Benjamin Franklin, of all people, sketched out a remarkably calculating, cold program for manipulating people into internalizing their enslavement: “Every master of slaves ought to know, that though all the slave possesses is the property of the master, [the slave’s] good-will is his own, he bestows it where he pleases; and it is of some importance to the master’s profit, if he can obtain that good-will at the cheap rate of a few kind words, with fair and gentle usage.” 47 Kindness, fairness, and gentleness—core human values—became useful tools for enslavement.

  Jefferson’s system took advantage of people rooted in old ways, who clung to conventions of loyalty and gratitude. They were tightly bound to him, and their interests intersected. Everyone cherished order. For the owner, maintenance of order kept the enterprise productive. For the slaves, order kept them alive and kept their families together. They absorbed whatever evil was done to them because something worse could always happen.* 48

  The superficial tranquillity of the plantation world helped to give the impression that the slaves had willingly accepted their enslavement. But Colonel Randolph knew that this was not a tranquil world but a desperate one. The man who hanged himself on the neighboring plantation had been, according to him, a slave who possessed “character,” which had not been enough to save him, and Randolph genuinely mourned the loss of this person fatally engulfed in the “sooty atmosphere” of the regime. From what he wrote, it seems that Randolph must have known the man well, because the letter stares deeply into a soul tormented by fear. His “character” sprang from terror.

  The man was “the most trust-worthy among them…being the one chosen to go on the road with the wagon always, to hand off grain and bring back supplies”; but his trustworthiness grew from a dread of being whipped. He had “seriously formed the resolution never to incur the punishment of stripes, by any misconduct.” But “for some trifling misdemeanour”—people said the man had left tools behind in the field—“the young fellow received a few lashes, on his bare back.” And so, that night, “he hung himself, 30 feet from the ground, in a tree near his Masters door.” Randolph did not see this as the act of a coward: “The bravery of this fellow seems to have left no room in his mind for [the thought of running away]. He had made a resolution, and he marched intrepidly forward in the execution of it, despising pain, and not knowing fear.” 49 The system that could kill such a man was merely “a hideous monster” behind a cheap mask of “a few kind words…fair and gentle usage.”

  “Their griefs are transient,” Jefferson wrote, suggesting that the enslaved, inside, were very nearly dead. He saw African-Americans as “a captive nation,” and his system was carefully designed, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, to “teach peace to the conquered.”50

  9

  A Mother’s Prayers

  Among the mundane letters in Jefferson’s archive about mansions, labor, and supplies, there is one of a completely different sort. It was a prayer.

  November 15th 1818

  Master, I write you a few lines to let you know that your house and furniture are all safe, as I expect you will be glad to know…. I was sorry to hear that you was so unwell you could not come [here] it greive me manny time but I hope as you have been so blessed in this [life] that you considered it was god that done it and no other one we all ought to be thankful for what he has done for us we ought to serve and obey his commandments that you may set to win the prize and after glory run

  Master, I donot [think] my ignorant letter will be much encouragement to you as knows I am a poor, ignorant creature

  adieu, I am your

  humble servant

  Hannah1

  Somehow Hannah had evaded Jefferson’s rule against literacy and had learned to write. When she wrote this, she was a forty-eight-year-old cook living at Poplar Forest. She followed Jefferson’s personal style, not capitalizing words and signing off “adieu.” The similarity of her writing to the master’s suggests that a Jefferson grandchild might have tutored her. The quality of her handwriting was so fine she could have forged papers for an escape, but she wouldn’t have done such a thing given the tone of her letter, which is startling in its self-abasement. Twice she calls Jefferson “Master,” and even though she could write far better than most white people, she calls herself “a poor, ignorant creature.” She is genuinely concerned that Jefferson has been ill, but more deeply grieved that his soul may be lost. “Set to win the prize and after glory run” had the ring of a quotation, not from the Bible, but from somewhere else; and sure enough, an American hymnal dating back to the early nineteenth century contains “Evening Shade” with the verses: “M
ay we set out to win the prize / And after glory run.” Hannah might well have sung those verses on the day she wrote the letter (Sunday, November 15) at the African Meeting House near the plantation.

  Hannah lived at Jefferson’s country retreat, Poplar Forest, some ninety miles from Monticello, near Lynchburg. Depending on conditions and the determination of the traveler, it could take from two to eight days to get there. Hannah did the cooking when Jefferson visited; at other times she sewed and worked “in the ground” as a common field hand. Jefferson had known Hannah from her infancy: he first wrote her name in his Farm Book when she was four, and he recorded the births of her children.2 She was born at Monticello in 1770, and Jefferson sent her when she was a teenager to Poplar Forest, where she married her first husband, Solomon, and had three children. Solomon disappears from the records without explanation. Hannah then married Hall, the Poplar Forest blacksmith, hog keeper, and foreman of labor.

  Hannah had a teenage son, Billy, who did not adopt the cooperative posture of his mother and began to attract the master’s attention in an alarming way. Jefferson wrote to an overseer in 1817, “I send Bedford Billy down to be put to work with the Coopers under Barnaby…. Billy is found too ungovernable for Johnny Hemings.”3 The “ungovernable” Billy remained so, despite attempts to reform him. He failed at Monticello’s cooper shop, was demoted to work “in the ground,” and was sent back to Poplar Forest, where the manager Joel Yancey wrote, “I had at one time great hopes of reclaiming him, but…I despair of making anything of him, he is certainly the most consumate, bloody-minded Villan that I ever saw of his age, and he becomes more and more daring as he increases in strength.” 4