Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  Under a canopy that protected them from the broiling sun, two female students worked amid a random scattering of rocks. Using a small trowel, one of them carefully scraped dirt onto a dustpan while the other took notes. Neiman said the rocks might have been part of a hearth that was dismantled when the slaves demolished the house and moved to another part of the mountain. About ten feet away Neiman watched someone wielding a plumb line and a ruler at the edge of a shallow pit where a neat line of bricks had been exposed.

  “We’re drawing,” said a voice behind me. It was Sara Bon-Harper, the archaeological research manager. She explained that they make measured drawings the old-fashioned way, by hand, rather than use a computerized camera process. “You can’t be too careful in your record-keeping.” Like Neiman, Bon-Harper was a lover of charts, graphs, and all things computerized, but she had made an important discovery here by intuition. After the team had found evidence of one house, she scrutinized the maps of artifacts generated by a computer program and had a strong hunch there had to be another structure, but the diggers were unable to find it. “For years I kept saying, ‘There’s another house there, we’re not finding it,’ making people dig more and more holes, and they were saying, ‘You’re crazy,’ and I said, ‘Dig more holes,’ and finally we dug one and came down on the corner of one of these features.” Dubbed, of course, “Sara’s House,” it yielded the brick-lined pit that was the object that moment of the meticulous measuring and Neiman’s intent gaze. Sara was very impressed with finding the brick-lined pit—“a fabulous season,” she said.

  “So what you have here,” I said, “is a cluster of houses not too far from where the overseer lived?”

  “Where there was presumably another cluster of houses, which we haven’t found yet,” Bon-Harper said.

  “Early on, we think,” Neiman added.

  “So the overseer would live cheek by jowl with the slaves?”

  “Exactly. That was the pattern early in the plantation. After they dispersed from these two sites, we see more spread-out and smaller settlements.”

  “Away from the direct supervision of the overseer.”

  “Exactly,” Bon-Harper said.

  One of the catchphrases of archaeological jargon I had seen on a poster back at headquarters—“spatial auto-correlation,” meaning “nearby things should be similar”—yielded the formula for an interesting discovery here. In the upper layer of this site the artifacts were similar, suggesting that the people who lived here owned and used similar items of clothing, pottery, and utensils. But when the archaeologists dug down into an older stratum, they found different types of artifacts in the same layer, evidence of two different groups of slaves residing in the same place at the same time. History provided the answer: the archaeologists had come down to the layer from the time when Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton and Martha’s slaves were brought to Monticello to be settled alongside Jefferson’s slaves. Over time, Martha’s slaves acquired the local varieties of clothing and other personal items. But where did they get these utensils, kitchenware, tools, and clothes?

  “This is one of many $64,000 questions,” Neiman said when I asked him. Archaeologists first assumed they were all hand-me-downs from the white family on the mountaintop, but careful dating of the artifacts suggested a different interpretation: “You see this regular turnover in stylish ceramics on the site. It’s pretty clear the slaves are expending effort to acquire ceramics that are relatively up-to-date, relatively stylish.”

  “They participated in a consumer economy,” Bon-Harper added. “They bought dishes, they bought buttons, they bought colorful fabrics. They bought all kinds of things for their houses.” She hastened to add that the houses were hardly luxurious—“not a lot of furniture, and dirt floors.” From her reading of the artifacts—not so much what she found as what she didn’t find—she concluded that the people here spent a great deal of time outdoors. The area between the house sites was so bare of fragments that she decided it was probably a swept yard, which was an African tradition. “I think that most people who lived in tiny, unheated, unglazed, uncooled houses do as much outdoors as they can. Inside it’s going to be smoky, it’s going to be close, it’s going to be not very well lit.”

  Bon-Harper was cradling something in her hand that I thought was a newly found artifact, but it was a small, quite contemporary trowel. “This is my sampling tool. I’m going to take half a dozen pollen samples.” She asked someone to bring over her “high-tech, calibrated measuring device”—an old film canister. Measuring the different pollen samples was another of the “geeky” undertakings that had produced its own effusion of computer-generated charts that trace the agricultural evolution of the mountain.

  Mining these sediment deposits involved digging seven-foot-deep “telephone booths” around the mountain. “We have been able to get pollen samples and put together a picture that suggests that erosion rates skyrocketed at the transition to wheat. Once you get wheat, you get permanent, clear-cut fields, deep plowing, crop rotations. It’s clear that there really is an important physical difference in the kind of work that slaves are doing. Different landscapes.”

  What was good for agriculture is bad for archaeologists, to whom “plow zone” is a dreaded phrase. “The land was churned up,” Bon-Harper said. “Plow-zone archaeology is one of the things I’m spending a lot of time in my analysis trying to sort out.”

  Some two hundred years after the plows did their work here, the archaeologists can still see their marks. Derek Wheeler, another archaeologist on the team, walked me over to the other house site they were excavating. Once again I stared at an utterly blank patch of bare, dry clay, which Wheeler proceeded to read for me. What I had seen as a formless blob of slightly off-color dirt, he identified as “a lot of charcoal,” and he pointed out a minuscule fragment of something else: “I think that’s going to be a little bit of burnt bone right there.” He pointed to an irregular brown patch and admitted he was “not sure what’s going on here.” Being irregular, it most likely did not indicate a root cellar, but they were planning to take a deeper look. “We’ll take out a little pie piece, dig down, and see what the underlying stratigraphy says.” I couldn’t notice anything else, but Wheeler waved his finger up and down the excavation: “See these etched brown lines? Those are plow lines, cut into the red subsoil.”

  The plows had not destroyed everything in their paths. “We’ve been finding a lot of personal items. We found a spoon last year, a thimble last year, we found a fork this year.” And they also came upon a jumble of bricks. “To find this many bricks here is tantalizing. Next year we’ll have to come back. Hopefully, we’ll have another pit.”

  Back at the first house site the student archaeologists had finished measuring the line of bricks. The diggers had turned up only a small portion of a construction that remained largely hidden in the clay. It didn’t look like much.

  “When you see archaeology in the movies,” I said, “you see them dig and find a box with all the stuff in it, and there are the secrets, right there.”

  “This is it!” Bon-Harper said. “This is the box with all the stuff in it and the secrets.”

  Overhearing these remarks, Neiman and another archaeologist said simultaneously, “It’s just a big brick-lined box!”—but they were joking, and Sara had been perfectly serious. She explained that the size of the pit and the fact that it needed so many bricks “shows a certain effort to procure brick. It looks like they were taken from different building projects around the plantation. And it had a couple of inches of sand, traditionally used in root cellars.” She speculated that the people who lived here built this large root cellar to store produce they had grown themselves, a surplus of food possibly for sale to the big house. The family who lived on this spot might have had their own garden and used the money they got from selling food to buy some of the artifacts that were turning up in the excavations.

  The holes in the ground that the archaeologists call “sub-floor pits
” would have been covered with boards. Neiman said the pits have been a mystery, “a long-standing archaeological puzzle,” since they were first noticed in excavations of a slave quarter near Williamsburg in the 1960s.3 Since then, excavations of slave quarters throughout the Chesapeake region have turned up so many of them, always located within the outlines of houses, that “sub-floor pits have become a classic sign of slave housing,” according to Neiman. Archaeologists developed several theories to explain them. They thought the pits might have been a West African tradition whose purpose is now unknown, or hiding places for stolen goods, or root cellars where food was preserved over the winter.

  Neiman was unsatisfied with these explanations, however, noting in the first case that there was little evidence that sub-floor pits were common in West Africa in the era of the slave trade. The idea that the pits were hiding places for things stolen from owners or other slaves did not hold up, because everyone, including owners and overseers, knew exactly where the pits were. Neiman mentioned a 1770 entry in the diary of the Virginia planter Landon Carter: “This morning I had a complaint about a butter pot’s being taken from the dairy…. I sent [the overseer] to search all their holes and boxes.” If both Carter and his overseer knew about the pits, they would have been the worst place to hide anything.4 It was feasible that the pits were root cellars, but Neiman said this use could not account for the fact that the size and frequency of the pits changed over time and that they had disappeared from slave housing by 1800.

  Neiman theorized that these pits were personal safe-deposit boxes of the “Purloined Letter” kind—safe because they were in plain sight. Chances were good that if you lifted the boards from someone else’s storage, you would be seen doing it.

  Slave houses of the mid-eighteenth century had several pits, but in the 1790s there were fewer of them, and then after around 1800 there were none. Neiman’s insight was that you needed a safe place for your possessions, as meager as they might be, if you shared a house with people you barely knew and didn’t trust, but “individuals who could choose to live only with trusted kin and close friends would have less need for such devices.” Early on, Jefferson housed many of his slaves without regard for their family ties or personal preferences. Newcomers and strangers forced to live together in close quarters felt so little connection that they habitually stole from one another. But as time went on, Jefferson allowed the slaves to choose their housemates, an unprecedented ceding of control. As families began to live together, the need for securing property declined. Indeed, the plantation documents show that by 1800 Jefferson had shifted to kin-based housing, a phenomenon seen across the Chesapeake region. In the aspect of life that was perhaps the most important—family life—the condition of the slaves was improving.

  When Jefferson and other planters in the region gave up raising tobacco in the 1790s because profits were uncertain and dependent on fluctuations in the European market, the damage done by tobacco to Virginia’s fields became more and more apparent. And Jefferson’s shift to wheat brought about a profound transformation in the lives of the slaves. “Under the tobacco regime,” Neiman said, “it was pretty much gang labor with the overseer out there all the time.” Large gangs of men and women were out in the fields performing the same task—making tobacco hills, transplanting, hoeing, pulling suckers, picking worms (the task especially suited for children), topping the plants, harvesting, and hauling. The slaves had to be both fast and careful. One overseer and the threat of the lash could keep a whole field full of people at work efficiently, day after day, month after month.

  But the shift to wheat changed all that.5 As Neiman wrote, “Wheat cultivation required plows, which in turn required smithing facilities and draft animals. Smithing required skilled smiths. Draft animals required fenced pastures, shelter, fodder crops, and attentive care. Plowing required permanent fields, which in turn required manuring and crop rotations to maintain soil fertility. Grain, fodder, and manure all required carting, which meant wagon makers and drivers.”6 Slaves now worked in smaller groups and acquired special skills.

  Neiman led the way farther down the mountain into a ravine, following the trace of a road laid out by Jefferson for his carriage rides. It passed the house of Edmund Bacon, the overseer Jefferson employed from 1806 to 1822. I had assumed that Bacon lived quite close to the summit, but this was about a mile from the mansion. And when Jefferson retired from the presidency in 1809, he moved the nailery from the summit—he no longer wanted to even see it, let alone manage it—to a site downhill one hundred yards from Bacon’s house. The archaeologists discovered unmistakable evidence of the shop—nails, nailrod, charcoal, coal, and slag. Neiman pointed out on his map the locations of the shop and Bacon’s house. “The nailery was a socially fractious place,” he said. “One suspects that’s part of the reason for getting it off the mountaintop and putting it right here next to the overseer’s house.”

  When Bacon left Monticello with the savings from his wages, he established himself on a farm in Kentucky, like thousands of other Virginia migrants of the 1820s. Shrewd and frugal, Bacon was so tight with his wages that he was able to lend money to two presidents—Jefferson and Monroe—as well as to members of Jefferson’s extended family. In the early 1860s, word of his presence reached the Reverend Hamilton W. Pierson, president of Cumberland College in Princeton, Kentucky. Realizing the historical value of the overseer’s store of memories, Pierson went to see Bacon, then seventy-five years old, with a companion who promised him, “We shall not be in the house many minutes before you will be certain to hear something of Mr. Jefferson.” Enthralled by what he heard, Pierson made several more visits to Bacon and recorded a long, fascinating narrative, which was published in 1862.7 Bacon’s paper trail is enormous, but he did not leave many artifacts for the archaeologists beyond a few shards of ceramics.

  About six hundred feet east of Bacon’s house stood the cabin of James Hubbard, a slave who lived by himself. The archaeologists dug more than a hundred test pits at this site but came up with nothing; but when they brought in metal detectors and turned up a few wrought nails, it was enough evidence to convince them they had found the actual site of Hubbard’s house.8

  Hubbard was eleven years old and living with his family at Poplar Forest in 1794 when Jefferson brought him to Monticello to work in the new nailery on the mountaintop. His assignment was a sign of Jefferson’s favor for the Hubbard family. James’s father, a skilled shoemaker, had risen to the post of foreman of labor at Poplar Forest, and Jefferson saw similar potential in the son. At first James performed abysmally, wasting more material than any of the other nail boys. Perhaps he was just a slow learner; perhaps he hated it; but he made himself better and better at the miserable work, swinging his hammer thousands of times a day, until he excelled. When Jefferson measured the nailery’s output he found that Hubbard had reached the top—90 percent efficiency in converting nailrod to finished nails.

  A model slave, eager to improve himself, Hubbard grasped every opportunity the system offered. In his time off from the nailery he took on additional tasks to earn cash. He sacrificed sleep to make money by burning charcoal, tending a kiln through the night. Jefferson also paid him for hauling—a position of trust because a man with a horse and permission to leave the plantation could easily escape.9 Through his industriousness Hubbard laid aside enough cash to purchase some fine clothes, including a hat, knee breeches, and two overcoats.

  And then, one day at the beginning of Jefferson’s second term as president, Hubbard vanished. For years he had patiently carried out an elaborate deception, pretending to be the loyal, hardworking slave. He had done all that hard work not to soften a life in slavery but to escape it. The clothing was not for show; it was a disguise.

  Hubbard had been gone for many weeks when the president received a letter from the sheriff of Fairfax County. He had in custody a man named Hubbard who had confessed to being an escaped slave. In his confession Hubbard revealed the details of his escape. He ha
d made a deal with Wilson Lilly, son of the overseer Gabriel Lilly, paying him $5 and an overcoat in exchange for false emancipation documents and a travel pass to Washington. But illiteracy was Hubbard’s downfall: he did not realize that the documents Wilson Lilly had written were not very persuasive.* When Hubbard reached Fairfax County, about a hundred miles north of Monticello, the sheriff stopped him and demanded to see his papers. The sheriff knew forgeries when he saw them and arrested Hubbard. The sheriff asked Jefferson for a reward because he had run “a great Risk” arresting “as large a fellow as he is.”

  Hubbard was returned to Monticello. If he received some punishment for his escape, there is no record of it. In fact, it seems that Hubbard was forgiven and regained Jefferson’s trust within a year. The October 1806 schedule of work for the nailery shows Hubbard working with the heaviest gauge of rod with a daily output of fifteen pounds of nails. That Christmas, Jefferson allowed him to travel from Monticello to Poplar Forest to see his family.10 Jefferson may have trusted him again, but Bacon remained wary.

  One day when Bacon was trying to fill an order for nails, he found that the entire stock of eight-penny nails—three hundred pounds of nails worth $50—was gone: “of course they had been stolen.” He immediately suspected James Hubbard and confronted him, but Hubbard “denied it powerfully.” Bacon ransacked Hubbard’s cabin and “every place I could think of” but came up empty-handed. Despite the lack of evidence, Bacon remained convinced of Hubbard’s guilt. He conferred with the white manager of the nailery, Reuben Grady: “Let us drop it. He has hid them somewhere, and if we say no more about it, we shall find them.”