But when Louisiana beckoned, ameliorating the condition of blacks was not on the planters’ minds. They sent an open letter to Congress describing the nature of the labor they wanted done. The levees on the Mississippi River “can only be kept in repair by those whose natural constitutions and habits of labor enable them to resist the combined efforts of a deleterious moisture, and a degree of heat intolerable to whites…. [T]he labor is great.” Jefferson had a letter from a planter describing the territory as a “vast swamp unfit for any creatures outside of fishes, reptiles, and insects.” Senator Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey said: “Slavery must be tolerated, it must be established in that country, or it can never be inhabited. White people cannot cultivate it.”11 A Georgia senator, himself a rice planter, said that restricting slavery in Louisiana “will depreciate…lands there fifty per cent.”12
South Carolina, anticipating a bonanza and taking the lead, as it would in 1861, reopened the international slave trade at Charleston even before the Louisiana Purchase was finalized. The traders knew that the Constitution authorized an end to the international slave trade in 1808, and they seized the day.
As slavery loomed over Louisiana, no less a figure than Thomas Paine—he of “These are the times that try men’s souls”—wrote directly to his old Revolutionary comrade in 1805, begging President Jefferson not to bring “poor negroes to work the land in a state of slavery and wretchedness.”13 At this fresh moment of decision, one man might change the course of events. In his letter Paine summoned the ghost of Jefferson’s old self:
I recollect when in France that you spoke of a plan of making the negroes tenants on a plantation, that is, allotting each negroe family a quantity of land for which they were to pay to the owner a certain quantity of produce. I think that numbers of our free negroes might be provided for in this manner in Louisiana. The best way that occurs to me is for Congress to give them their passage to New Orleans, then for them to hire themselves out to the planters for one or two years; they would by this means learn plantation business, after which to place them on a tract of land as before mentioned. A great many good things may now be done.
But the question of the status of free blacks in the new American possession had already been decided.
The governor in New Orleans, William Claiborne, reported his concern about a long-established militia organization, the Free Colored Battalion of New Orleans, which had fought in the Patriot cause against the British during the Revolution. This free black militia carried out many important tasks: they were the ones who, when floods threatened the levees, turned out to make them stronger; they fought fires in New Orleans; they chased runaway slaves. When the militia dispatched a letter to Claiborne praising “the Justice and Liberality” of the American character and declaring their own “sincere attachment to the Government of the United States,” to which “we shall offer our services with fidelity and Zeal,” their offer reached the highest level of the government.14 Jefferson and his cabinet decided to allow the militia to believe, for the moment, that the justice and liberality of the United States would descend on them; in his notes of a cabinet meeting Jefferson recorded the decision that the militia “be confirmed in their posts, and treated favorably, till a better settled state of things shall permit us to let them neglect themselves.”15 But more than benign neglect was to occur: the aspirations of the free blacks in New Orleans were to be crushed.
The congressional debate over slavery in Louisiana presented Jefferson with an opportunity. For a brief time, the political will existed in Congress to stem the tide of slavery; an outright ban on slave importations—in a proposed bill that was not supported by the president—just barely failed to pass. Two decades earlier, Jefferson the younger radical had written the terms of the Ordinance of 1784, banning slavery in any new territory of the United States: “After the year 1800…there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude.” Such a law would have put slavery on a timetable; those who held slaves would have had sixteen years to figure a way out of it. But the ordinance—which would have included Mississippi and Alabama—failed to pass in the Continental Congress when just one delegate from New Jersey missed the vote due to illness. Jefferson himself wrote that “the fate of millions unborn” had been determined by the absence of this one man.
After the 1784 limitation on slavery failed to pass, as the historian Joyce Appleby has written, Jefferson “backed away from attacking the institution as his power to do something about it increased.”16 As president, Jefferson could have proposed something similar for Louisiana—an emancipation plan with a horizon of fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years, permitting slavery to “fertilize” the province but then requiring that it diffuse itself into oblivion, as he said he wanted to happen. But no such message emanated from the White House.
Congress defied Jefferson, allowing the movement of slaves into Louisiana but with a set of restrictions that outraged slaveholders. The laws approved in 1804 “held out promise for severely curbing the growth of slavery in the western reaches of the new American empire,” as one historian summarizes them. The importation of slaves was allowed, but not by traders, only by an actual owner, “a citizen of the United States, removing into said Territory for actual settlement.” If a Virginian wished to open a sugar plantation manned by his slaves, he had to go and be there himself. Furthermore, the law forbade an owner to sell his slaves in Louisiana.17
Those already in the territory blustered, threatened secession, and raised the dire image of their welcoming Napoleon back to Louisiana, for they could see the congressional intent to ban slavery in the future. On the other hand, Congress knew that only slaveholders had the ready cash to establish new Louisiana plantations quickly.18 In response to pressure from slave owners, and equally enormous pressure to have the territory settled as quickly as possible with American citizens in a “torrent of emigration,” Congress added a sunset clause allowing the restrictions to expire after one year. John Quincy Adams remarked sardonically, “slavery in a normal sense is an evil; but as connected with commerce it has important uses.”19
“Diffusion” might have worked had President Jefferson put some muscle into the temporary restrictions on slavery. Without such an effort, however, diffusion led not to the weakening of slavery but to the opposite—the strengthening of slavery and the weakening of the Union. As Ira Berlin writes, “Slaveholders drove small farmers…to the margins, [and] in the absence of competitors, slaveholders solidified their rule.”20 In William Freehling’s assessment the Louisiana Purchase, with its “gigantic massing of slaves,” resulted in a “republican catastrophe.” As large planters surged into the territory, “little of the richest Louisiana or Arkansas dirt remained for Jefferson’s backbone of liberty, slaveless white farmers.”21
Some years later John Drayton, the South Carolina governor who had campaigned to get slavery into Louisiana, expressed “the firm conviction that a separate confederacy of the slave-holding States is the object now aimed at & will be steadily pursued.” The necessary elements for such a confederacy were already in place, he said: “its chivalric population, its valuable products & an unrestrictic [sic] commerce” would create “utopia in full reality.”22 His image of a “chivalric” society is revealing and chilling: slaveholders had an extraordinarily romantic view of themselves, seeing themselves not as slave drivers but as knights, though they rode on the backs of slaves.
Jefferson, in his capacity as secretary of state, had been in charge of the patent office when Eli Whitney sent in his plans for the cotton gin in 1793. He was transfixed. He peppered the inventor with questions: “How many hands”—meaning how many slaves—“does it take to operate this machine?” “What quantity of cotton has it cleaned?” When Whitney received his patent for the cotton engine, Jefferson called it the most important invention the nation had produced. He had seen the future.
Jefferson saw slavery as congruent with his Enlightenment conception of the world and a quasi-religious vision that he a
rticulated from time to time. Pious Christians denounced him as an atheist, but Jefferson did have a deistic belief in the workings of God; he could see the hand of the deity, for example, in the evident prosperity of the United States. In his first inaugural address he spoke of “acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence which by its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter [emphasis added].” Near the conclusion of the address he returned to that theme: “May that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe, lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.”
On his home ground in Virginia and at Monticello, Jefferson saw divine agency in the “increase” of black children, his human assets: “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.” He ordered his manager to take special care in the treatment of the “breeding” women.23 There is little or no distance between this “providential” calculation and “the branch of profit” Jeff Randolph reviled—“to rear slaves for market”—but Jefferson had thoroughly rationalized what he was doing.
The business of slavery was conducted in such a “sooty atmosphere” that morality vanished in the smoke. Near the end of 1815, Jefferson sold a three-year-old girl from Monticello named Sally, the daughter of Aggy, to his overseer at Poplar Forest, Jeremiah Goodman, for $150.24 Jefferson and Goodman agreed that Sally would remain with her mother at Monticello. It seemed strange that an overseer would spend $150 to own a girl who lived ninety miles away, but in later records Sally turns up with the surname Goodman, so the overseer was buying his own daughter. A year and a half later Goodman changed his mind: he wanted to sell Sally back to Jefferson for $180, so the two men decided that the sale was “annulled.” One day Sally had a father; the next day she did not. In such a world, such things happen and no one is responsible. The founding has many fathers, but slavery is an orphan.
The long list of people who begged Jefferson to do something about slavery includes resounding names—Lafayette, Kosciuszko, Thomas Paine—along with the less-known Edward Coles, William Short, and the Colored Battalion of New Orleans. They all came to Jefferson speaking the Revolution’s language of universal human rights, believing that the ideals of the Revolution actually meant something.
Deeply reluctant to judge a Founder as wanting in moral force, modern commentators retreat to a range of adjectives such as “flawed,” “human,” “contradictory,” “paradoxical,” “compartmentalized,” while preserving for Jefferson what the historian Alan Taylor calls “a fundamental core of naive innocence.”25 But at Jefferson’s core there lay a fundamental belief in the righteousness of his power. Jefferson wore racism like a suit of armor, knowing that it would always break the sharpest swords of the idealists.
Lafayette had a powerful insight, detecting in slaveholders a combination of “prejudices, Habits, and Calculations.”26 This combination acted as their engine, in place of a conscience. Racism ratified their power, as did the dispensations of Providence. They were precursors of the Ayn Rand protagonist of the twentieth century. One of Rand’s admirers wrote gratefully to her that she had “the courage to tell the masses…you are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” Rand herself composed a sentence that could have come from the pen of a Southern planter: “The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”27
Jefferson fashioned a system at Monticello that worked supremely well; he lacked for nothing in the many long years he lived there before, during, and after his presidency. And yet the consensus among historians has been that he was weighted down and eventually dragged under by slavery. Ellis expressed this consensus when he wrote:
His lifestyle, his standard of living itself at Monticello, were all dependent upon the institution of slavery…. It was an ironic form of dependence, because he went bankrupt, as did a significant percentage of the planter class in Virginia, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slavery in Virginia was not working as an economic institution.28
Such assessments come from a close study of what Jefferson said, but not from the evidence of his ledgers. “I am not fit to be a farmer with the kind of labour we have,” he once famously complained. But then we find him reporting in 1800 that “my nailery…still flourishes greatly, employing 16. boys at a clear profit of about 4. to 500£ annually.” Feeling pinched, he “executed a mortgage to you on 80. slaves, which at a sale would fetch 4000£.” He settled one debt in installments, “the last of which will be paid off by this year’s crop”—a crop that was of course planted, cultivated, and harvested by his black slaves. Would white men have done better, produced more? Actually, no: he found white tenant farmers, when he could locate any, to be lazy and pigheaded, leaving the fields “in a slovenly and disgusting state; and to get the tenants to aim at something better is extremely difficult…. it is easy enough to get tenants if you will let them destroy the land.”29
We simply cannot believe Jefferson’s complaints about his slaves, which fit into his pattern of shifting blame to others for his own mistakes and weaknesses. During his presidency Jefferson averred that the slave’s “burden on his master [is] daily increasing,” yet as the economic historian Steven Hochman has found, “during his presidency Jefferson’s nailery and his farms provided an income that should have met reasonable expectations. The debit side of Jefferson’s balance sheet was where he had his problems.”
In 1801, the first year of his presidency, Jefferson overspent his salary by some $8,600, earning $25,000 and spending $33,636.84. He laid out $3,100 for a new carriage and horses, wishing to have “first-rate” steeds, and, Hochman adds, “a particularly large item was $2,797.38 for wines.”30 Debt never prevented Jefferson from doing anything he wanted to do. He built Monticello and then rebuilt it on a grander scale; then he built his Poplar Forest mansion; then he spent some $30,000 on a mill and canal near Monticello. The historian Herbert E. Sloan writes, “Had he not poured some $30,000 into his flour mill and local navigation improvements, he might have withstood some of the pressures that crushed him.”31 The consensus must be turned around: with Jefferson miring himself in debt, his slaves kept him afloat.
The blow that finally destroyed Jefferson’s finances came not from the supposedly burdensome slaves, whose labors were financing his lifestyle and the modernization of his plantation, but from his in-law Wilson Cary Nicholas, the former senator. In 1818, when Nicholas was heavily invested in land speculations, he asked Jefferson to co-sign a $20,000 note—and then promptly went bankrupt. Even so, Jefferson managed to stagger along at Monticello.
At its extreme edge idealism becomes rude, and so it was when the Marquis de Lafayette visited Monticello in 1824, on his final, highly emotional, triumphal tour of the nation he helped to create, and he pressed Jefferson about his failure to do anything to end slavery. Before modern commentators deride any criticism of Jefferson as rank “presentism,” they should consider the appeal that came from the lips of Lafayette, a hero very much of that time.
When Lafayette arrived at Monticello, he fell into Jefferson’s arms. An enormous throng, gathered on the lawn of the mansion, settled into a profound silence as the two heroes embraced and wept. In the following weeks the old friends took daily carriage rides around the mountain, driven by a slave, Israel Gillette Jefferson, who left a memoir: “I well recollect a conversation he had with the great and good Lafayette, when he visited this country…as it was of personal interest to me and mine.”32 He continued:
On the occasion I am now about to speak of…the conversation turned upon the condition of the colored people—the slaves…. [M]y ears were eagerly taking in every sound that proceeded from th
e venerable patriot’s mouth.
Lafayette remarked that he thought that the slaves ought to be free; that no man could rightly hold ownership in his brother man; that he gave his best services to and spent his money in behalf of the Americans freely because he felt that they were fighting for a great and noble principle—the freedom of mankind; that instead of all being free a portion were held in bondage (which seemed to grieve his noble heart)…. Mr. Jefferson replied that he thought the time would come when the slaves would be free, but did not indicate when or in what manner they would get their freedom. He seemed to think that the time had not then arrived.
At Jefferson’s death, his slaves paid the price for the master’s first-rate acquisitions and his relative’s speculations in western lands. The families of Jefferson’s most devoted servants were split apart. Onto the auction block went Caroline Hughes, the nine-year-old daughter of Jefferson’s gardener Wormley Hughes. Also sold away from her family was Isabella Fossett, age eight. One family was divided up among eight different buyers, another family among seven buyers.33
Joseph Fossett, the Monticello blacksmith, was among the handful of slaves freed in Jefferson’s will, but Jefferson left Fossett’s family enslaved. In the six months between Jefferson’s death and the auction of his property, Fossett tried to strike bargains with white families in Charlottesville to purchase his wife and six of his seven children. His oldest child (born, ironically, in the White House itself) had already been given to Jefferson’s grandson. Fossett found sympathetic buyers for his wife, his son Peter, and two other children, but he watched the auction of three young daughters to different buyers. One of them, seventeen-year-old Patsy, immediately escaped from her new master, a University of Virginia official.
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 29
