Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  These terms came as no surprise to Jefferson. He had helped Kosciuszko draft the will, which states, “I hereby authorize my friend, Thomas Jefferson, to employ the whole [bequest] in purchasing Negroes from his own or any others and giving them liberty in my name.” Kosciuszko’s estate had grown to nearly $20,000, and this money was Jefferson’s for the taking. But he refused it, even though it would have relieved the debt hanging over him while also relieving him, in part at least, of the “moral reproach” of slavery.19

  Coles, Kosciuszko, and William Short all saw the appalling corruption of slavery and its burgeoning power. The only force that could turn the tide was, they believed, the sacred, incorruptible idealism of the Revolution. A leader wielding that instrument could conquer any evil—and so they turned to Jefferson. “All mankind are endowed by nature with equal rights,” Coles wrote to Jefferson. No one knew this language better than Jefferson—indeed, he had helped to create it—and he replied to Coles, in kind, that “the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast, & had become as it were the vital spirit of every American.” But note the past-perfect tense: he was evoking a Revolutionary spirit that had come and gone. His supplicants did not realize how much Jefferson had changed.

  If Jefferson had accepted Kosciuszko’s bequest, as much as half of it would have gone not to Jefferson but, in effect, to his slaves—to the purchase price for land, livestock, equipment, and transportation to get them started in a place such as Illinois or Ohio. Moreover, the slaves most suited for immediate emancipation—smiths, coopers, carpenters, the most skilled farmers—were the very ones whom Jefferson most wanted to keep. He also shrank from any public identification with the cause of emancipation.

  As U.S. minister to France in the 1780s, Jefferson had begun to see slave labor as the most powerful and most convenient engine of the American enterprise. With a class of slaves, the United States could produce the commodities (tobacco and rice) needed to pay down the country’s debt to Great Britain. And then in the next decade, on his home ground, Jefferson began to perceive the pure financial value of owning slaves. Farming would always be a species of “gambling,” in his memorable image, but the ownership of slaves, and the existence of a robust secondary market for slaves, provided not only a safety net but an investment opportunity.

  We have seen how he worked out his 4 percent formula—the annual increase in the value of his slaveholdings. It had long been accepted that slaves were assets that could be seized for debt, but Jefferson turned this around when he used slaves as collateral for that very large loan he took out from the Dutch banking house in order to rebuild Monticello. He pioneered the monetizing of slaves, just as he pioneered the industrialization and diversification of slavery with his nailery, textile factory, coopering shop, short-lived tinsmithing business, and gristmill. Far from regarding slaves as childlike and incompetent, he realized they were highly amenable to training in specialized skills, and he put into effect a long-term program to staff his plantation with skilled people for decades. He took the 1789 emancipation plan he had outlined in Paris—which would train slaves to prepare them for citizenship—and turned it on its head.

  Nevertheless, Jefferson’s reputation as an emancipator has remained more or less intact. “No Virginian (and probably no American) did more than Thomas Jefferson to oppose slavery,” writes Robert Turner of the University of Virginia School of Law.20 This belief that he was a frustrated emancipator rests in large part on the letters he wrote to progressives who questioned him about emancipation—or at any rate on the snippets from these letters that have received wide circulation thanks to the modern publication of Jefferson’s papers. Many of them have been compiled on the Monticello website under the rubric “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation.” Beautifully composed, in stirring, evocative prose, the letters make inspiring reading.

  The language of these letters is remarkably uniform from the 1780s to his death in 1826, and remarkably similar to the conversation Jefferson had with the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt at Monticello in 1796. Jefferson forcefully states his personal commitment to the ideal of emancipation: in the online compendium he mentions his willingness to sacrifice anything for emancipation in four different documents. He states his concern for the welfare of his slaves while saying that the black people remain incompetent. He alludes to the horror of racial mixing. Whenever someone presents him with evidence of intelligence and achievement among black people, he dismisses the evidence.

  In replying to Coles, Jefferson reached far back into the past, repeating the old rumor from the 1770s that a Quaker experiment in freeing slaves had failed miserably, that the Quakers “had set free a parcel of lazy, worthless negroes.”21 In fact, the Quaker emancipation and many others just like it in Delaware and Maryland had been extremely successful, but Jefferson continued to circulate the useful fiction that blacks “are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” The historian William W. Freehling writes that in Delaware and Maryland “black freedmen formed an orderly working class,” but in the minds of Jefferson and other slaveholders “the phenomenon of orderly free blacks could not happen and therefore had not happened.”22

  When Jefferson walked around Philadelphia in company with Kosciuszko in the 1790s, he encountered a thriving class of free black Americans. As the historian Richard Newman writes: “A census of the free black community conducted by Pennsylvania abolitionists in 1790…found stable black families, hard-working people of color, and a desire among free blacks and newly liberated enslaved people to master both literacy and marketable skills.”23 As we have seen, at Monticello he had mechanics capable of building him a carriage, capable of comprehending and making real his designs for woodwork (which he adjudged the finest in the country), skilled at smithing, painting, glazing, coopering, and so on. His cooks, trained at the White House by French professionals, could easily have made a living as free people. Moreover, these skills were all the more valuable to him, as to all Virginia’s planters, because white artisans were so scarce, so costly, and so often drunk. According to one estimate, by the mid-nineteenth century about 80 percent of Virginia’s artisans were enslaved or free blacks.24 Nothing could be more convenient than owning an entire community of skilled working people. Having seen all this with his own eyes, Jefferson continued to speak of the “imbecility” of blacks.25

  In his letters and in his conversations Jefferson blamed slavery on the slaves. On an 1807 visit to Monticello a British diplomat, Augustus John Foster, was treated to a disquisition on African-American stupidity:

  He told me, also, that the Negroes have, in general, so little foresight that though they receive blankets very thankfully from their masters on the commencement of winter and use them to keep off the cold, yet when the warm weather returns they will frequently cast them off, without a thought as to what may become of them, wherever they may happen to be at the time, and then not seldom lose them in the woods or the fields from mere carelessness.26

  In fact, the slaves had no blankets, because Jefferson’s overseers had not distributed any. In a memorandum to a new overseer, a year before the diplomat’s visit, Jefferson wrote, “I allow them a best striped blanket every three years. Mr. Lilly had failed in this; but the last year Mr. Freeman gave blankets to one-third of them.”27 Jefferson knew one thing to be true but said another to a credulous outsider.

  In one instance, Jefferson admitted to a friend that a response he had given to a French progressive was not entirely honest. In the summer of 1808, Henri Grégoire, bishop of Blois, sent Jefferson a copy of his new book, De la littérature des Nègres, later translated into English as An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes. As its title implies, Grégoire’s Enquiry sought to discredit the notion of black inferiority through a survey of literary achievements. Jefferson responded fulsomely:

  Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of t
he doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on par with ourselves…. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief.

  But to a friend who also knew Grégoire, Jefferson said that he was utterly unimpressed by the anthology, which was the product, he thought, of the bishop’s “credulity,” which was why, he added, “I wrote him…a very soft answer.”28

  Jefferson claimed he was waiting to find what he called a “natural aristocrat” among the blacks, a scholar such as himself. When candidates did present themselves—the poet Phillis Wheatley and the mathematician Benjamin Banneker—Jefferson dismissed and derided their achievements. In Notes he had advanced the idea that black people were “in reason much inferior” because he had never known of a black person “capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” But when Coles went to Illinois, he took enslaved farmers and made them yeomen; Kosciuszko had farmers in mind. Neither looked for Euclidean scholars.

  Always, Jefferson told his supplicants to look toward the future with hope. The day of emancipation was coming. It would arrive when white people experienced “a revolution in public opinion,” as he wrote to yet another correspondent who brought up emancipation. But in an 1805 letter to an intimate, his private secretary, William Burwell, he wrote, “I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us.”29 The governments of all the Southern states were in the hands of slaveholders whose sense of justice and morality was defined not by the soaring language of the Revolution but by their pocketbooks. Among this class, Jefferson said to Burwell, “interest is morality.” As a senator from Georgia declared: “You cannot prevent slavery—neither laws moral or human can do it. Men will be governed by their interest, not the law.”30

  Around the time that Coles was struggling to settle his freed people in Illinois, Jefferson wrote to a congressman expressing sentiments that Coles might have written: “I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach”—he meant the moral reproach of slavery. “The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought.”31 But to his son-in-law he wrote just eight weeks later: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital.”32 And when he was mulling over what he would do about Kosciuszko’s will, he wrote to a manager:

  a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man. in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly…. with respect therefore to our women & their children I must pray you to inculcate upon the overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration with us.33

  Jefferson composed one of his most famous metaphors to express his fear of a murderous slave rebellion: “we have the wolf by the ears and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose.”34 But Jefferson also thought of the slave as a creature that inexhaustibly produces gold. His wolf metaphor has been widely published, but an unpublished letter written in 1810 records another remark that is less known: upon learning that a relative thought of selling his slaves, Jefferson said that “it wou’d never do to destroy the goose.”35

  Jefferson deployed his most soaring language not where it would do the most good—in a public campaign to awaken the conscience of the slaveholders—but to soothe would-be emancipators while he deflected their petitions. The truth was that slavery would end not when South Carolina planters suddenly started to sing “Amazing Grace” but when it ceased to be profitable, and Jefferson helped to make that day recede into the very, very distant future as vast new territories opened up just over the horizon. When in 1803 Jefferson acquired Louisiana for the United States and doubled the size of the country, the question arose: Would we have slavery in this new land? As the Senate began debate on the purchase, President Jefferson sent a secret note to his floor manager, instructing the senator to insert a clause in the bill for establishing a government in Louisiana: “Slaves shall be admitted into the territory.”36

  17

  “Utopia in Full Reality”

  On the summit of Monticello, Jefferson arranged everything beautifully. But outside the plantation’s gates, devils prowled. His daughter saw them: “the country is over run with those trafickers in human blood the negro buyers.”1 The black people of Virginia had been fully monetized. From Albemarle County and other places in the Old South, coffles of people were driven west and south. Between 1810 and 1861, a million slaves were taken to the interior in a forced migration “dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade that had carried Africans” to America, as Ira Berlin has written.*2

  At its extreme edge the pursuit of happiness bends morality as gravity bends light. With the free market in people fully open and unrestricted, Jefferson’s grandson Jeff Randolph was aghast at a peculiarly vile “branch of profit” being avidly pursued: “It is a practice, and an increasing practice, in parts of Virginia, to rear slaves for market,” he said in 1832. He rose before Virginia’s legislature to ask, with soaring oratory such as his grandfather could have unleashed but did not: “How can an honorable mind, a patriot, and a lover of his country, bear to see this Ancient Dominion, rendered illustrious by the noble devotion and patriotism of her sons in the cause of liberty, converted into one grand menagerie, where men are to be reared for the market, like oxen?”3

  This is the narrative beneath Manifest Destiny, a realm of actuality experienced by people at the bottom of American society and viewed only in fragments by those above them, an actuality that formed its own narrative and that survives perpetually: African-American music, James Baldwin wrote more than a century later, “begins on the auction block.” 4

  As early as the 1780s, Jefferson had his eye on the vast “country before us,” which lay waiting for Americans “to fill with people and with happiness.”5 Chafing at the borders that restrained expansion, he wrote in 1801, during the first year of his presidency:

  it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, & cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, & by similar laws: nor can we contemplate, with satisfaction, either blot or mixture on that surface.6

  The time was not so distant.

  The following year, President Jefferson received reports that Spain intended to hand over to France its enormous Louisiana territory, including the important port of New Orleans. A crisis arose when Spain transferred the territory to France and, in October 1802, restricted American trade through New Orleans. Jefferson ordered the U.S. minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, to open negotiations with Napoleon to buy the city and the region surrounding it. France responded with an offer to sell the entire territory, and by the end of 1803 the huge Louisiana Purchase came into American hands. For $15 million the United States acquired some 827,000 square miles of land from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains.

  When Jefferson had written in 1801 that no “blot or mixture” could be allowed to mar the surface of the West, he meant, of course, the presence of blacks. But in Paris, Livingston observed that “slavery alone can fertilize those colonies,” so Jefferson reversed his policy of racial exclusion.7 As President Jefferson and Congress considered how to absorb and govern the new territory, Jefferson instructed Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky (a Virginia native who was shor
tly to become Jefferson’s attorney general) to allow African-American slaves in the territory, thus becoming, as Robert McColley writes, “the father of slavery in Louisiana.”8

  Slavery already existed in Louisiana. The Spanish had slaves, so did the French, and so did Americans who had crossed into Spanish territory to establish plantations. They imported slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, and they loudly demanded that no restrictions be placed on this commerce, insisting that “African laborers” were “all important to the very existence of our country.” Without them, “cultivation must cease.”9

  Just a few years earlier, in 1798, Congress had debated the question of allowing slavery into Mississippi when it had been acquired by treaty from Spain. Confronted by human-rights arguments that slavery was “an evil in direct hostility to the principles of our Government,” slave-holders countered with soothing arguments about “amelioration” and “diffusion.” A Virginia senator explained: “if the slaves of the Southern States were permitted to go into the Western country…there would be a great probability in ameliorating their condition, which could never be done whilst they were crowded together as they are now in the Southern States.” Jefferson’s protégé Senator Wilson Cary Nicholas of Virginia added that Congress would be “doing a service” to the slaves by admitting them to Mississippi because “in time it might be safe to carry into effect the plan which certain philanthropists have so much at heart…the emancipation of this class of men.”10 Only from the mouth of a slaveholder could the word “philanthropist” come out as a taunt.