Walking through the woods after a heavy rain, Bacon spotted muddy tracks on the leaves on one side of the path. He followed the tracks to their end, where he found the nails buried in a large box. Immediately, he went up the mountain to inform Jefferson of the discovery and of his certainty that Hubbard was the thief. Jefferson was “very much surprised and felt very badly about it” because Hubbard “had always been a favorite servant.” Jefferson said he would question Hubbard personally the next morning when he went on his usual ride past Bacon’s house.
When Jefferson showed up the next day, Bacon had Hubbard called in. At the sight of his master, Hubbard burst into tears. Bacon wrote, “I never saw any person, white or black, feel as badly as he did when he saw his master. He was mortified and distressed beyond measure…. We all had confidence in him. Now his character was gone.”
Hubbard tearfully begged Jefferson’s pardon “over and over again.” For a slave, burglary was a capital crime. A runaway slave who once broke into Bacon’s private storehouse and stole three pieces of bacon and a bag of cornmeal was condemned to hang in Albemarle County. The governor commuted his sentence, and the slave was “transported,” the legal term for being sold by the state to the Deep South or the West Indies.11 And even Bacon felt moved by Hubbard’s plea—“I felt very badly myself”—but he knew what would come next: Hubbard had to be whipped. So Bacon was astonished when Jefferson turned to him and said, “Ah, sir, we can’t punish him. He has suffered enough already.” Jefferson offered some counsel to Hubbard, “gave him a heap of good advice,” and sent him back to the nailery, where Reuben Grady was waiting, “expecting…to whip him.”
Jefferson’s magnanimity seemed to spark a conversion in Hubbard. When he got to the nailery, he told Grady he’d been seeking religion for a long time, “but I never heard anything before that sounded so, or made me feel so, as I did when master said, ‘Go, and don’t do so any more.’” So now he was “determined to seek religion till I find it.” Bacon said, “sure enough, he afterwards came to me for a permit to go and be baptized.”12 But that, too, was deception. On his authorized absences from the plantation to attend church, Hubbard made arrangements for another escape.
During the holiday season in late 1810, Hubbard vanished again, and his story plays out like a wartime tale—one deception piled on another, clandestine meetings and deals, forged identity papers, a desperate flight through a hostile countryside. The documents about Hubbard’s escape reveal that Jefferson’s plantations were riven with secret networks. Jefferson had at least one spy in the slave community who was willing to inform on his fellow slaves for cash; Jefferson wrote that he “engaged a trusty negro man of my own, and promised him a reward…if he could inform us so that [Hubbard] should be taken.” But the spy could not get anyone to talk. Jefferson wrote that Hubbard “has not been heard of.” But that was not true: a few people had heard of Hubbard’s movements. Jefferson could not crack the wall of silence at Monticello, but an informer at Poplar Forest told the overseer that a boatman belonging to Colonel Randolph aided Hubbard’s escape, clandestinely ferrying him up the James River from Poplar Forest to the area around Monticello, even though the white patrollers of two or three counties were hunting the fugitive.13 The boatman might have been part of a network that plied the Rivanna and James Rivers, smuggling goods and fugitives.
Possibly, Hubbard tried to make contact with friends around Monticello; possibly, he was planning to flee to the North again; possibly, it was all disinformation planted by Hubbard’s friends. At some point Hubbard headed southwest, not north, across the Blue Ridge. He made his way to the town of Lexington, where he was able to live for over a year as a free man, being in possession of an impeccable, genuine manumission document.
His description appeared in the Richmond Enquirer:
a Nailor by trade, of 27 years of age, about six feet high, stout limbs and strong made, of daring demeanor, bold and harsh features, dark complexion, apt to drink freely and had even furnished himself with money and probably a free pass; on a former elopement he attempted to get out of the State Northwardly…and probably may have taken the same direction now.
A year after his escape Hubbard was spotted in Lexington. Before he could be captured, he took off again, heading farther west into the Allegheny Mountains, but Jefferson put a slave tracker on his trail. Cornered and clapped in irons, Hubbard was brought back to Monticello, where Jefferson made an example of him: “I had him severely flogged in the presence of his old companions, and committed to jail.” Under the lash Hubbard revealed the details of his escape and the name of an accomplice; he had been able to elude capture by carrying genuine manumission papers he’d bought from a free black man in Albemarle County. The man who provided Hubbard with the papers spent six months in jail.14 Jefferson sold Hubbard to one of his overseers, and his final fate is not known.
A plantation’s borders might seem porous, making escape easy, so the question arises: Why didn’t more slaves try to run away? Did they actually prefer the life of slavery? But they lived as if in an occupied country. As Hubbard discovered, few could outrun the newspaper ads, the slave patrols, the vigilant sheriffs demanding papers, and the slave-catching bounty hunters with their guns and dogs. Hubbard was brave or desperate enough to try it twice, unmoved by the incentives Jefferson held out to cooperative, diligent, industrious slaves.
Throughout his narrative Bacon said nothing unpleasant about slavery; his memoir purified it. A historian who studied Bacon said he “lacked a certain discrimination,” and saw in him the New World version of old England’s “Plain Country Fellow”: “He is sensible of no calamity but the burning of a stack of corn or the overflowing of a meadow, and thinks Noah’s Flood the greatest plague that ever was, not because it drowned the world, but spoiled the grass.”15
Bacon so profoundly admired Jefferson that his idolatry became something of a joke among his fellow overseers, one of whom said to him, “Well, I believe if Mr. Jefferson told you to go into the fire, you would follow his instructions.”16 He filtered his memories of Monticello through the lens of admiration; he could not help himself, because the process was reflexive, unconscious. Merely in describing Jefferson’s physical appearance, Bacon suddenly veered into a hymn: “His skin was very clear and pure—just like he was in principle.”17 Thus Bacon told the story of James Hubbard’s trial and Jefferson’s forgiveness to illustrate a point about Jefferson’s character:
Mr. Jefferson was always very kind and indulgent to his servants. He would not allow them to be at all overworked, and he would hardly ever allow one of them to be whipped. His orders to me were constant: that if there was any servant that could not be got along without the chastising that was customary, to dispose of him. He could not bear to have a servant whipped, no odds how much he deserved it.18
But in trying to suggest that punishment was virtually nonexistent under Jefferson, Bacon inadvertently reveals that it was routine—there stands Reuben Grady with the whip, prepared to dispense “the chastising that was customary”—and he reveals how Jefferson distanced himself from the ugly reality of his system. When Jefferson had personally to authorize the whipping of Hubbard, face-to-face, he shrank from it. And Jefferson’s pardon amazed Grady, who “was astonished to see [Hubbard] come back and go to work after such a crime.”*
On one level Bacon’s memoir offers a vivid picture of the decline and fall of an old order. As the financial shadows gather and deepen, Bacon wrings his hands over Jefferson’s struggles and misjudgments. But we also see the Jeffersonian vision surviving in Bacon, who embodies the rising new man of the South, the “yeoman farmer” Jefferson idealized. He expressed Jefferson’s philosophy in humble terms, writing to the sage himself in 1819, “I consider it of such importance that every person who has a family should have a home and that should be of such soil as will produce well.”19 He omitted to mention slaves, but his memoir reveals the plain country fellow gathering human assets at bargain rates from the depleted arist
ocrats as he patiently lays plans for his own slave-driven plantation in Kentucky.
In his interview with the Reverend Pierson, Bacon took the opportunity to settle some old scores and as an aside leaked more revealing information. He despised the Randolphs and mocked them mercilessly. He had to compete with two generations of them for control of Monticello—Jefferson’s son-in-law Colonel Randolph and the colonel’s son Jeff Randolph—and he clearly did not like being second-guessed by them. “The Randolphs were all strange people,” he declared.20 In one of his rants against the family, this time against Colonel Randolph for his inability to control his finances, Bacon said, “I often loaned him money,” and when the colonel was stuck, “he would be obliged to sell some of his Negroes.”
On one such occasion the colonel sent an urgent note to Bacon by a slave messenger saying that he needed $150 in cash by the next day, a necessity that compelled him against his will to offer Bacon a slave from the Edgehill plantation. Overnight Bacon raised the cash. He was quite proud of his capacity, on a few hours’ notice, to put cash on the barrel when the haughty Randolphs were strapped. He made the deal the next day and told the Reverend Pierson all about it: indeed, he still had the receipt! Let me show it to you, Reverend. As he unfolded the paper, Bacon said, “She was a little girl four years old.”*21 Her name was Edy, daughter of Fennel. The transaction was done in a trice; no hole on the mountain could hide the child.
Leaving the site of Bacon’s house, we tramped into a ravine and then up again, following the Fourth Roundabout, cut into a hillside below a field. Neiman told me that the Third Roundabout was above us, running along the edge of what had been a field in Jefferson’s time. He abruptly turned off the path and clambered up the slope. He paused at a tall poplar and pointed to the ground, where I could see some rocks scattered about. Nothing much here, I thought.
“These rocks are the hearth of Betty Hemings’s house.”
The poplar had long ago taken root in the middle of the hearth and broken it apart, leaving the scatter of stones in an otherwise empty forest near the edge of a field. It was not a terribly impressive site, but for some reason I found it very moving.
“We worked on this site the first summer I was here,” Neiman said. “Jefferson actually mapped it, and we were able to locate it on the cheap.” By “on the cheap” he meant they didn’t have to dig a hundred empty holes before hitting it. On his arrival at Monticello, Neiman had looked at Jefferson’s maps of the mountain and noticed a small square with the label “B.Hem” written in Jefferson’s hand. The map was so accurate that it was a simple thing for the archaeology team to follow it right to Hemings’s house and dig it up.22
“It was probably a little log house with a chimney base,” Neiman said. “Actually, we found a pole for a chimney prop. There’s a little artifact scatter in here—the remains of her dinner plates, et cetera.” He thought the house probably took no more than about a week to build, with the workmen using scrap bricks salvaged from other work sites to build part of the hearth. She had a large garden, and the Monticello records show that even in her last years she was raising vegetables and poultry for sale to the mansion.23
Betty Hemings was the mother of Sally and, if one accepts the contention that Sally had children with her master, the grandmother of some of Thomas Jefferson’s children. Thinking about her grandchildren made me realize why I found the site so touching. Some time earlier I had read the memoir that Betty’s grandson Madison Hemings set down when he was sixty-eight, one of the prime sources in the Hemings-Jefferson controversy. Reading it closely for “evidence,” I was brought up short by an aside about his childhood. Madison said that his earliest memory, from when he was about three years old, was of his grandmother: “She was sick and upon her death bed. I was eating a piece of bread and asked if she would have some. She replied: ‘No, granny don’t want bread any more.’ She shortly afterwards breathed her last.” It had no evidentiary value; it was simply a small touching fragment of humanity.
Neiman believed that Jefferson built the house for Hemings around 1795. Before that, she had been sent to an outlying farm called Tufton, “for reasons we don’t understand,” Neiman said. “She was a house servant. So why she’s at an outlying quarter farm is not clear.” But her return to Monticello in 1796 coincided with the birth of Sally Hemings’s daughter Harriet. “So you think about the grandmother hypothesis,” Neiman said. “She moved back here to be around as the children are born.” If they were Jefferson’s children, it would make sense that he would want a trusted nurse for them. She lived close enough to the mansion and Mulberry Row to be available for child care, but far enough away so that when measles broke out on the mountaintop in 1802, Jefferson thought her house would make a good quarantine for the black children who had the disease.
Jefferson built the house thirty feet from the Third Roundabout. Any passing rider could have waved to Betty Hemings and probably did. Among the artifacts the archaeologists found here were some small bits of clear glass, so the house had a glazed window. When Neiman compared Betty Hemings’s porcelain with shards from the house of a white workman, he found that she had rather fancy dinnerware and a cheap tea set. He surmised that teatime was a more important social event for the white man and his family than it was for Betty Hemings, but she liked to set an attractive table for dinner.24
We left the house site and zigzagged down through the forest to pick up a new trail. We had walked for a few minutes when I began to hear voices and see moving shapes through the trees ahead. It was an odd sensation in the silent woods, where one could genuinely feel lost in time, and odder still when we walked a little farther and I saw we had landed at Monticello’s Visitor Center, back in the present day. Hundreds of tourists were arriving and boarding vans that glided up the steep mountain road to the mansion at the top. Neiman led the way downhill through a series of parking lots to a large patch of grass and trees surrounded by pavement but set off by a split-log fence.
“This was long rumored to be a slave cemetery,” Neiman said, and that’s what the archaeologists believe it to be. The memory of the graveyard’s existence seems to have flickered on and off at Monticello. When the parking lots were laid out and paved in the 1970s, preliminary maps marked this spot as “old graveyard,” so someone knew there were graves here, and it wasn’t paved over. The information that something was here may have been passed to the staff by a groundskeeper, Randolph Crawford, who lived in a small house nearby. He had noticed that stones on this site were arranged in a way that suggested they might be markers, though there were no names on them. More intriguing to him was a mysterious circle of fieldstones. Suspecting that the site had a link to Monticello’s former slaves, he spoke to an African-American housekeeper who worked at the mansion. She told him that it was indeed a burial ground and that “her people used to build a circle of stone” to use at funerals: the mourners would make a fire within the circle, seat themselves around it, and tell stories about the deceased.
Though the graveyard was spared, the memory of it faded at Monticello. “They knew the cemetery was there when they built the parking lot,” Neiman said. “As people left the staff, it was forgotten about, except vaguely.” After seeing the imposing Jefferson-Randolph family graveyard near the summit, where Jefferson lies buried beneath a monumental obelisk, visitors would often ask, “Where were the slaves buried?” and the answer was “We don’t know.”25
The African-American cemetery asserted its presence subtly. Whenever the mountain got a light dusting of snow (heavy snowfalls are a rarity in these parts), faint depressions revealed themselves in outline, vanishing with the melting snow. In good weather, when sunlight fell across the parking lot at a certain slant, rows of shadows appeared in the ground. For archaeologists, graves are hard to locate and just as hard to verify.
One of Neiman’s predecessors, Barbara Heath, took note of the clues in 1990 and decided to investigate. The most direct approach—digging down until she struck actual burials�
�was immediately ruled out as a desecration. Heath began with the least intrusive method, remote sensing by magnetometry, which identifies magnetic anomalies created by the presence of human remains. The machines yielded “maddeningly ambiguous” results. The archaeologists called in a consultant, who took one look at the site and pointed to the small boulders of greenstone scattered about. Greenstone, the parent material of Monticello Mountain, is loaded with iron that deranges magnetic testing—“one of those boulders has more iron in it than a Winnebago,” said the consultant. When technology failed them, Heath and her crew went back to old-fashioned methods, painstakingly mapping every tree, rock, and dip in the ground, identifying twenty-four depressions that they believed held graves.
Ten years later Neiman returned to the site with new magnetometers, but when the ambiguities persisted, he too decided to revert to old-fashioned methods, excavating in shallow squares, just deep enough to reveal the presence of grave shafts but not deep enough to disturb any burials. One of the most interesting finds was something they did not find: there was no evidence of plowing. Much of Monticello had been plowed over in Jefferson’s time and later, but not this patch of ground. Neiman’s crew found an old plow blade at the very edge of the cemetery, so the plowmen had gone that far but no farther. He identified twenty burial shafts, eight of which were believed, because of their small size, to hold the graves of children. Five graves had stones, but with no markings.
Because this soil is so highly acidic, it was very unlikely that any human remains, or other artifacts except coffin nails, could still exist in the shafts, but Monticello’s archaeologists let a potentially valuable opportunity pass when they decided, out of respect, not to dig to the bottom. Other burials of slaves in the South have been excavated with startling results. A dig at Stratford Hall plantation, where Robert E. Lee was born, turned up thirteen African-American burials from the eighteenth century. Three black men were buried there with African-style clothing. Excavations in the Chesapeake region have discovered burials with beads and seeds, another African custom. Archaeologists in Georgia unearthed a slave’s grave with remnants of a plate above the head, which fit with the custom “to place the last plate, the last glass and the last spoon used before death on the grave.” Other excavations have yielded bits of crockery, upturned bottles, seashells, and particular plants with significance in African cultures. The historian Philip Morgan has explained: “All these practices were ways of propitiating the dead, of easing their journey into the spirit world, and of ensuring that they did not return to haunt the living.”26
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 17
