Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  Above all Coles believed in the responsibility of the individual. If you had principles, you had to act by them. Rather than following “the will of the majority,” the individual must obey “what he believed to be the will of God, and felt to be the dictates of right deeply implanted in his nature.”

  As he persisted in his debates with the bishop-professor, Coles found that “in theory” the bishop agreed with him, “but I could not convince him he was bound to carry out his theory, & to act up to his principles, by giving freedom to his Slaves.” Bishop Madison looked to the legislature to abolish slavery, as did Jefferson. George Washington expressed the same wish for years, until, weary of waiting for the political climate to change, he decided to defy convention and act on his own to free his slaves.

  Coles agreed that he too would prefer a general emancipation sanctioned by the state, but if the people of Virginia

  neglected to do their duty, & tolerated a state of things which was in direct violation of their great fundamental doctrines, I could not reconcile it to my conscience & sense of propriety to participate in it; and being unable to screen my self under such a shelter, from the peltings & upbraidings of my own conscience, and the just censure, as I conceived, of earth & heaven, I could not consent to hold as property what I had no right to.5

  He kept his intentions secret because he had not yet received title to the slaves allotted to him, and he believed that if his father discovered his intentions, he would not pass title to the slaves.6 But as soon as his father died, Coles told his family of his intention to free his slaves. They argued against the “folly of throwing away property which was necessary to my comforts, and which my parents all their lives had been labouring to acquire.” How would he support himself?

  Despite the objections of his family, Coles said his resolution remained “fixed & unalterable”: his “aversion to living in the midst and witnessing the horrors of slavery” compelled him to action. Deeply reluctant to leave his home and family, he considered remaining in Virginia and freeing his slaves on his home ground, retaining them as paid free laborers.7 But his friends were “indignant” at the very idea of it, ominously warning that both he and his freed slaves “would be considered and treated as pests of society, and every effort made to persecute, to injure, and to extirpate us.”8

  Edward’s brother Isaac had served as President Jefferson’s private secretary, and on Isaac’s recommendation Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, offered Edward that post in 1809. Eager to put his emancipation plan into action immediately, Coles agonized over accepting the president’s offer and decided to reject it so that he could the more quickly free his slaves. Riding into Charlottesville to post his letter turning down the offer, Coles encountered James Monroe, who urged him to accept the job, which, he argued, would familiarize him with the leaders of the western states and provide the necessary background information for an emancipation. Monroe told Coles that “it was particularly desirable that I should associate with non-slaveholding people,” whose “habits & customs were so different” from what he had been accustomed to in Virginia, with its “peculiar state of society.” (It is interesting that Monroe believed not only that slave and non-slave societies were very different but that it was Virginia that was “peculiar.”)9 At Monroe’s urging, Coles took the post, and he later went to Russia as President Madison’s special envoy to Tsar Alexander I.

  In Madison’s White House, Coles felt the giddy sense of luxury at the crest of American society: “the ease and self indulgence of being waited on…the luxuries of the table &c &c, in which children are usually brought up by the rich planters of the Southern states, had been…increased and confirmed as a habit in me, by a residence of more than five years in the family of the President of the United States.” First at home, and then at the White House, Coles said, he received a “double schooling” in the “great & protracted indulgence in the highest walks of ease and luxury in this Country.” Later, when he lived without servants, the memory of that ease and luxury “made me feel more sensibly my diminished means of living, & especially the want of being waited on.”10

  Travelers remarked on the laziness slavery induced in white people of all classes. In his American Geography the New England clergyman and geographer Jedidiah Morse noted the “dissipation of manners [that] is the fruit of indolence and luxury, which are the fruit of the African slavery.”11 Conversing with “the indolent masters” of Virginia, the French journalist Brissot de Warville heard all their reasons for the impossibility of freeing slaves: “they fear that if the Blacks become free, they will cause trouble; on rendering them free, they know not what rank to assign them in society; whether they shall establish them in a separate district, or send them out of the country. These are the objections which you will hear repeated every where against the idea of freeing them.” Brissot de Warville regarded all of this as a tissue of rationalizations, believing that the real obstacle was “the character, the manners and habits of the Virginians. They seem to enjoy the sweat of slaves. They are fond of hunting; they love the display of luxury, and disdain the idea of labour.”12

  Coles’s service to Madison only strengthened his determination to carry out an emancipation. Riding through the capital, on numerous occasions President Madison and Coles passed coffles of slaves chained up for the auction block or for the dreaded journey farther south. Coles had the nerve to needle the president on his luck that no foreigners happened to be riding with them: “I have taken the liberty to jeer him, by congratulating him, as the Chief of our great Republic, that he was not then accompanyed by a Foreign Minister, & thus saved the deep mortification of witnessing such a revolting sight in the presence of the representative of a nation, less boastful perhaps of its regard for the rights of man, but more observant of them.”13

  While working at the White House, Coles turned his thoughts to his deferred emancipation plan and decided to recruit an ally, a renowned advocate of liberty who would certainly lend his support, Thomas Jefferson. In July 1814, Coles took up his pen with “hesitation” and “embarrassment” to call Jefferson’s attention to “a subject of such magnitude, and so beset with difficulties…a general emancipation of the slaves of Virginia.” Expressing “the highest opinion of your goodness and liberality,” Coles quickly came to his point: “My object is to entreat and beseech you to exert your knowledge and influence in devising and getting into operation some plan for the gradual emancipation of slavery.”

  Referring to Jefferson as one of “the revered fathers of all our political and social blessings” and extolling the “valor, wisdom and virtue [that] have done so much in ameliorating the condition of mankind,” Coles then sharpened his pen and thrust it straight at the Founder: “it is a duty, as I conceive, that devolves particularly on you, to put into complete practice those hallowed principles contained in that renowned Declaration, of which you were the immortal author, and on which we founded our right to resist oppression and establish our freedom and independence.”

  Coles did not ask Jefferson to free his slaves immediately, but to formulate a general emancipation plan for Virginia and lay it before the public, backed by his immense prestige. Referring to Jefferson’s “great powers of mind and influence,” Coles urged him to put forth a plan “to liberate one-half of our fellow beings from an ignominious bondage to the other.”14

  Jefferson put him off. Although slavery presented “a moral reproach to us” and “the love of justice and the love of country” demanded emancipation, he could detect no “serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral & political reprobation.”15

  Jefferson said he was waiting for signs of “progress of public sentiment”—signs of slave owners (there was no other “public”) changing their minds. “I had always hoped that the younger generation…would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it,” he wrote, though he had in his hands a letter from a member of t
he younger generation. He insisted that the right moment had not yet arrived because progress “has not been sufficient.” He soothed Coles about the delay: “Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come.” Rejecting the idea that individuals should act on their own, he opined that the only way to bring about emancipation was for the legislature to set a date after which all slaves born in Virginia would be trained to take care of themselves—and then be exiled.

  Emancipation, he went on, required “a gradual extinction of that species of labour & substitution of another, [to] lessen the severity of the shock which an operation so fundamental cannot fail to produce.” The shock, he thought, would be felt both by the Virginia economy and by the freed people. He repeated language he had used twenty-five years earlier: “Brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, [black people] are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young. In the mean time they are pests in society by their idleness, and the depredations to which this leads them.”

  He understood why Coles had approached him “as the person who should undertake this salutary but arduous work,” but he insisted he was too old. “This enterprise is for the young…. It shall have all my prayers, & these are the only weapons of an old man.” He urged Coles not to leave Virginia but to “reconcile yourself to your country and its unfortunate condition” and to work “softly but steadily” to bring about the day of emancipation:

  come forward in the public councils, become the missionary of this doctrine truly christian; insinuate & inculcate it softly but steadily, through the medium of writing and conversation; associate others in your labors, and when the phalanx is formed, bring on and press the proposition perseveringly until its accomplishment…. And you will be supported by the religious precept, “be not weary in well-doing.”*

  Believing in the unique capacity of a great leader, Coles wrote to Jefferson again, insisting that he was one of “the only persons who have it in their power effectually to arouse and enlighten the public sentiment, which in matters of this kind ought not to be expected to lead, but to be led.” Coles agreed that the public was sunk in apathy and inertia, weighted by “habit and interest.” It could be jolted from its stupor only by someone such as Jefferson, someone who possessed “a great weight of character, and on whom there devolves in this case a most solemn obligation.” To Jefferson’s protest that he was too old to take up the cause, Coles riposted: “Your time of life I had not considered as an obstacle to the undertaking. Doctor Franklin, to whom, by the way, Pennsylvania owes her early riddance of the evils of slavery, was as actively and as usefully employed on as arduous duties after he had past your age as he had ever been at any period of his life.”*16

  That was the end of the correspondence. The revolutionary refused to take up the torch, and Coles turned his thoughts to Illinois.

  Several years earlier Jefferson had received another powerful and practical appeal to join in an emancipation “experiment” from his former private secretary in Paris, William Short, whom Jefferson called his “adoptive son.” Sixteen years younger than Jefferson, Short attended William and Mary, where he studied law under George Wythe as Jefferson had. Short was one of the founders of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and one of America’s early millionaires. His father left him a substantial inheritance, which he invested shrewdly in land, canals, and, later, railroads. A relative of Jefferson’s wife, he had been a guest at Monticello in the 1770s and 1780s, including the day in 1781 when British raiders ascended the mountain and nearly captured the Founder and when the Jefferson family fled to Poplar Forest. He was at Poplar Forest during the weeks when Jefferson worked on his Notes on the State of Virginia—a significant coincidence. For almost certainly Jefferson discussed his ideas, including his racial theories, with Short.

  Jefferson noticed that his protégé possessed “a peculiar talent for prying into facts.” In 1788 in France, Short visited a château that Jefferson had also visited, and commented on the labor system that had struck Jefferson as a possible replacement for American slavery—the métayage, or sharecropping, system. In two letters written to Jefferson five years apart, in 1793 and 1798—long after Jefferson had returned to America but when Short was still in Europe—Short turned Notes on the State of Virginia around, deploying Jefferson’s Enlightenment language in that book to demolish Jefferson’s “suspicions” about black inferiority and racial mixing.

  In 1793 he seized on a passing remark Jefferson had made in their correspondence—“We are beginning in Virginia to think of tenanting our lands”—and used it as the opening gambit for a discussion of métayage and freeing slaves. He asked Jefferson if “by tenanting you mean that humane and philanthropic system of [renting farms] to the slaves.” This was what Jefferson had indeed proposed in 1789 when he told Edward Bancroft of his plan to settle some of his slaves on farms alongside German immigrants. Jefferson had not carried out that plan, but Short contemplated doing it himself:

  I think those who have the misfortune to own slaves, should for the sake of humanity make the experiment. When I shall return to America it is my intention to preach this not only by precept but by example—and for this purpose I intend purchasing a small number—it is a subject my mind goes much on—I have already formed the rules to be observed for exciting in these people the idea of property and the desire to acquire it, which I think would be easily done.

  Acting as Short’s agent, which he did for the many years when Short lived in Europe, in 1795 Jefferson purchased a thirteen-hundred-acre plantation near Monticello called Indian Camp, later known as Morven.* Short approached the moral problem of slavery as a businessman would, with a free-market approach—“exciting in these people the idea of property and the desire to acquire it.” He did not share Jefferson’s racial views; indeed, he thought he saw signs of “the perfectibility of the black race” and believed that slaves could, given the chance, work their way out of slavery. For him, the notion of turning slaves into free tenants “seems…to unite the very ideas which are formed to give the most heartfelt satisfaction to a pure and virtuous mind—viz. an union of the purest principles of humanity with the prosperity of one’s country.”

  Short was convinced that owners would make more money from renting land to free blacks than from compelling enslaved blacks to work the same acres. He told Jefferson that if a few owners were to try the experiment, keep careful track of their expenses and profits, and publish the results in the newspapers, slaveholders would see that it was in their financial interest to free their slaves. He emphasized the profit motive: “The only way to bring men…to desire an event is to show that they have an interest in it. I wish the slaveholders to be attacked by proofs that their interest would not suffer.” He expected such an undertaking to encounter difficulties, but they would be overcome: “Whatever may be the result of the first essays, time & repetition will I think infallibly shew the advantage of free, above forced, labor.”

  The historian Billy Wayson, a close student of the financial dealings between Jefferson and Short, sees the latter as an important transitional figure. Old-line Virginians measured wealth in land, slaves, and honor; Short expresses the emerging mode of capitalism. And it was the capitalist in this pair who argued for using the free market and incentives to end slavery in Virginia.17

  Like Coles, Short believed in the power of a leader, suggesting that someone of Jefferson’s talent and stature could get the experiment started: “Let the enlightened & virtuous citizens, who toil for public instruction, turn the public mind towards this subject, & endeavour to demonstrate that the owners of slaves would gain in point of interest by the change.” His letter combined an appeal to Jefferson’s Enlightenment principles with a large dose of flattery. He wrote of “a penetrating genius capable of diving into the bosom of futurity”; he said that “this great & momentous object, the transformation of 700,000
slaves into free citizens, [required] the talents of the statesman, the philosopher, the philanthrope, in short all who have any regard to the interests of their country or the rights of humanity.” His syntax suggests numerous people, but he knew that Jefferson saw himself as the combination of all those personae.

  Short proposed an eminently workable plan for freeing the slaves who were “the most industrious & most ripe for liberty”—allow one day of the week, “or any other portion of their time,” in which the slaves could earn money to purchase themselves.18 Short suggested that the Virginia legislature could pass a law requiring owners to try this plan. He did not say it, but the implication was clear that Jefferson could put this program in place on his own at Monticello. Jefferson made no reply.

  Having lived with Jefferson in Paris, Short had gotten to know Sally Hemings and may well have been aware of Jefferson’s relationship with her when he boldly attacked Jefferson’s core objection to emancipation—his professed aversion to miscegenation. In a startling discourse on the beauty of racial mixture, Short compared the loveliness that could be attained by racial mingling to “the perfect mixture of the rose & the lilly.” If black people were set free, he foresaw a “gradual mixture” with the happy result that “all of our Southern inhabitants should advance to the middle ground between their present color & the black.” The extraordinary word in that sentence is “advance”—a direct challenge to Jefferson’s contention that mixing degraded his race. To this also, Jefferson made no reply.

  As Edward Coles was making final preparations for his trek to Illinois in the early months of 1819, Jefferson actually had in hand the means to free some Monticello slaves and send them to new lives under Coles’s leadership. His old friend the Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko had died in 1817, leaving the will that bequeathed Jefferson funds to free his slaves and purchase land and farming equipment for them to begin a life on their own. In the spring of 1819, Jefferson pondered what to do about this bequest. Kosciuszko had made him executor of the will, so Jefferson had a legal duty, as well as a personal obligation to his deceased friend, to carry out the terms of the document.*