Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
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Instead of thinking about Jefferson and his slaves as an “ironic,” “paradoxical,” or “complex” subject, perhaps we should train ourselves to say “perverse.” It is indeed a perverse irony if enslaved Americans have risen from the dead to save Jefferson one more time.
Jefferson’s stirring antislavery pronouncements of the 1770s and 1780s reflect his leading role in a surge of American progressivism. Assessing “the critical period between 1776 and 1787,” David Waldstreicher writes, “The Continental Congress had intermittently moved against the slave trade and nearly banned slavery from the new northwestern territories. A consensus existed in many, perhaps most parts of the country that slavery was inconsistent with American revolutionary principles and ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history.”19 During that window of political opportunity and heady idealism, Virginia passed its remarkably liberal manumission law of 1782, and two years later Jefferson proposed his ban on slavery in the western and southern territories—the measure that failed by one vote.
As he composed Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson sensed a deflation of Revolutionary fervor: “From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill.” He feared that once they returned to business as usual, Americans would care less about abstractions such as Revolutionary ideals: “They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, [and] will be made heavier and heavier.”
The haunting image of shackles growing heavier was prophetic. The black people were doomed to perpetual shackles once they became financial instruments. Jefferson was not the only planter to discern the “silent profit.” As slaveholders in the new nation grasped that not only the labor of slaves but their increase would support the plantation system indefinitely, they exulted at the prospect before them. One Deep South planter declared: “owing to the operation of this institution [slavery] upon our unparalleled natural advantages, we shall be the richest people beneath the bend of the rainbow.”20 And so the slaves were doubly doomed when Jefferson allowed slavery into Louisiana.
From the time he began composing Notes until the end of his life, Jefferson assumed the role of Great Communicator on slavery, defending himself and his country against all challengers. As luminaries such as Lafayette and Thomas Paine discovered, debating Jefferson would always prove fruitless. A shrewd and relentless lawyer, he composed briefs for the defense containing “just enough of the semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the people,” to borrow his own words.21 In their entirety Jefferson’s rationalizations amount to nothing compared with his perfectly clear presidential order to admit slavery to the Louisiana Territory. Later in his life Jefferson mocked abolitionists for “wasting Jeremiads on the miseries of slavery” and more or less went over to arguing that slavery was a positive good. Describing what he could see from his terrace—Mulberry Row’s “ameliorated” cabins, where his enslaved relatives lived—he claimed in 1814 that American slaves were better fed and clothed than England’s workers and “labor less”—an argument that to this day is the trump card for slavery’s retrospective apologists.22
In the 1790s, as Jefferson was mortgaging his slaves to build Monticello, George Washington was trying to scrape together the financing to free his slaves at Mount Vernon, which he finally ordered in his will, to be carried out “without evasion, neglect or delay.” He proved that emancipation was not only possible but practical, and he overturned all the Jeffersonian rationalizations. Jefferson insisted that a multiracial society with free black people was impossible, but Washington did not think so. Never did Washington suggest that black people were inferior or that they should be exiled; nor did it occur to him that people must be “capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid,” as Jefferson stipulated, in order to deserve citizenship.
It is curious that we accept Jefferson as the moral standard of the Founders’ era, not Washington. Perhaps it is because the Father of His Country left a troubling legacy: his emancipation of his slaves stands not as a tribute but as a rebuke to his era, and to the prevaricators and profiteers of the future, and declares that if you claim to have principles, you must live by them. Americans like to believe, however, as Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in The Irony of American History, that “we are (according to our traditional theory) the most innocent nation on earth.”23 Jefferson perpetually murmurs absolution over compromise, delay, and evasion, offering a transcendent innocence that is impervious to reality.
That is why he has survived the Sally Hemings scandal. He had struck a deal with a sixteen-year-old girl and made the grown woman stick to it for the rest of her life, knowing she would sacrifice her body and soul to save her children. Every day she cleaned his bedroom. Every day their son Madison counted the months until he would get free of that place and that man, his father, the master and enslaver. But when this sorry history came before the public in our own time, Jefferson’s stock rose—because we wanted it to. Jefferson’s unchangeable symbolic role is to make slavery safe.24 Only a supremely powerful totem can guard our collective memory on this score, shining brilliantly enough to avert our gaze from the traffickers in human blood roaming outside the gates.
Notes
Introduction: “This Steep, Savage Hill”
1. Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals, p. 34; Richard Rush, Oct. 9, 1816, quoted in Stein, Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, p. 50. This paragraph is based on the opening of my 1984 essay on Monticello in Mansions of the Virginia Gentry, p. 118.
2. “Education: The Power of the Mind,” Monticello.org, quoting Charles Bullock, 1948.
3. “Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson,” Frontline, “Jefferson’s Blood,” PBS.org; “Peter Fossett, the Venerable Ex-Slave.” Fossett used the word “friends” with its old meaning: benefactors. Thus TJ’s granddaughter once spoke of her wish to “befriend” a slave.
4. Levy, First Emancipator, p. 178.
5. Whitman, “Spanish Element in Our Nationality,” p. 386.
6. Freeman, George Washington, vol. 1, p. 6.
7. Morgan and Nicholls, “Slaves in Piedmont Virginia,” pp. 248, 251.
8. Eric Slauter, “The Declaration of Independence and the New Nation,” in Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, p. 21.
9. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp. 174, 179.
10. TJ to Edward Bancroft, Jan. 26, 1788, in Papers, vol. 14.
11. Quoted in McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, p. 125.
12. Lander and Ellis, “Founding Father.”
13. Lottie Bullock, quoted in Stanton, “Other End of the Telescope,” p. 146. Stanton notes that Bullock’s mother “had been raised by a Hemings descendant in Charlottesville.”
14. Notes on Arthur Young’s letter to George Washington, June 18, 1792, in Papers, vol. 24. Original document: TJ to George Washington, June 18, 1792, “Notes on Mr. Young’s Letter,” General Correspondence, 1651–1827, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, image 734, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/.
15. TJ to Madame Plumard de Bellanger, April 25, 1794, in Papers, vol. 28.
16. Washington to Alexander Spotswood, Nov. 23, 1794, in Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, vol. 34, p. 47, http://etext.virginia.edu/washington/fitzpatrick/.
17. Davis, “Enduring Legacy of the South’s Civil War Victory.” Another scholar who has noted the slave owners doing all they could to increase the enslaved population is Catherine Clinton, “‘Southern Dishonor’: Flesh, Blood, Race, and Bondage,” in Bleser, In Joy and in Sorrow, pp. 53–55. Fogel, Slavery Debates, p. 27: “During the decade of the 1970s, the growing mountains of evidence finally made it obvious that the profitability of slavery was increasing, not declining, on the eve of the Civil War. Moreover, the sharp rise in the purchase price of sl
aves relative to their rental price meant that slave owners were never more confident about the future of their system than they were during the last half of the 1850s.”
18. The sanitized version is in Betts, Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, Thomas Mann Randolph to TJ, Jan. 31, 1801, p. 443; full text: Martha Jefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randolph to TJ, postscript, Jan. 31, 1801, in Papers, vol. 32; “ideal rural community”: Francis L. Berkeley Jr., introduction to Farm Book, p. xviii.
19. Baker, “Memoirs of Williamsburg, Virginia.”
20. Stanton, Free Some Day, p. 142.
21. Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, p. 284.
22. Ellis, “Philadelphia Story.” Joyce Appleby writes, “The paradox is so blatant, there is probably another answer.” Appleby, Thomas Jefferson, p. 142.
23. Melville, “Benito Cereno,” p. 306.
1. “Let There Be Justice”
1. Lucia Stanton, “Jefferson’s People,” in Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, p. 95.
2. Adams, Jefferson’s Monticello, pp. 75, 76 caption 65.
3. Thomas Jefferson Randolph Memoirs, version 2, no. 1397.
4. Beiswanger, Monticello in Measured Drawings, p. 37.
5. Quoted in Beiswanger, “Thomas Jefferson and the Art of Living Out of Doors.”
6. Anna Maria Thornton, quoted in Howard, Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson, p. 146.
7. TJ to Charles Clay, Aug. 23, 1811, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 4.
8. Quoted in Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, p. 149.
9. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, pp. 72, 71.
10. Ibid., p. 11. Isaac Granger has hitherto been known as Isaac Jefferson, and his memoir of life at Monticello was published under that name, but the surname Jefferson may have been applied to him by the memoir’s nineteenth-century editor. Recent research by Monticello’s historian Lucia Stanton indicates that the blacksmith’s surname was actually Granger.
11. Ibid., p. 71.
12. TJ to Benjamin Austin, Jan. 9, 1816, in Peterson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, p. 1370.
13. Stanton, Free Some Day, p. 105.
14. Harrison and Burke, Two Monticello Childhoods, pp. 4–5.
15. Stanton, Free Some Day, p. 138.
16. “Lafayette’s Visit to Monticello (1824),” account of Israel Jefferson, Monticello.org.
17. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, p. 4.
18. Langhorne, “Black Music and Tales from Jefferson’s Monticello,” p. 60.
19. TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., June 8, 1803, Library of Congress.
20. Daugherty, Way of an Eagle, p. 232.
21. TJ moved Sally Hemings and his cooks out of Mulberry Row into rooms underneath the terrace, but he never got around to fixing up Mulberry Row. Kelso, Archaeology at Monticello, pp. 44–46.
22. Bear and Stanton, Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, vol. 1, pp. 36–37. McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, pp. 154–55. The slaves worked for nothing; the contractor and their owner took the wages.
23. D’Souza, What’s So Great About America, p. 113.
24. Bear and Stanton, Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, vol. 1, p. 37. TJ made a slight error, writing “ruet” instead of “ruat,” so the actual meaning is “let justice be done, the sky will fall.”
25. Ibid., pp. 245–47.
26. Quoted in Rhys Isaac, “The First Monticello,” in Onuf, Jeffersonian Legacies, p. 85.
27. He was remembering the journey when his family moved from Albemarle County to another plantation near Richmond, when TJ was two. Sarah N. Randolph, Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, p. 23.
28. Susan Kern, lecture, Jefferson Library, International Center for Jefferson Studies, Sept. 12, 2006; Kern, Jeffersons at Shadwell, pp. 75–77.
29. Notes on the State of Virginia.
30. TJ to Edward Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7.
31. Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries, app. p. 66.
32. TJ to Edward Coles, Aug. 25, 1814.
33. Argument in the case of Howell v. Netherland, in Ford, Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1.
34. Randolph, “Edmund Randolph’s Essay on the Revolutionary History of Virginia,” April 1935, p. 122.
35. Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, p. 188.
36. Ibid., pp. 180–82, 184, 187.
37. Quoted in Maier, American Scripture, p. 112.
38. Randolph, “Edmund Randolph’s Essay on the Revolutionary History of Virginia,” July 1935, p. 216.
39. Stephen A. Conrad, “Putting Rights Talk in Its Place,” in Onuf, Jeffersonian Legacies, p. 269. Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler writes that in Summary View, “Jefferson attacked the existence of slavery in Virginia because it was inconsistent with liberty” and in so doing split with his Virginia peers “in a significant way.” Hatzenbuehler, “I Tremble for My Country,” p. 51.
40. Randolph, “Edmund Randolph’s Essay on the Revolutionary History of Virginia,” July 1935, pp. 216, 215.
41. Jean Yarbrough writes: “In the original draft, Jefferson makes it clear that he considers slaves to be men…. By virtue of their membership in the human race, all men possess certain inalienable rights. That Jefferson means to include the slaves is clear from the original version, where he attributes to the slaves ‘the most sacred rights of life and liberty,’ which rights they enjoy by virtue of their ‘human nature.’” Yarbrough, “Race and the Moral Foundation of the American Republic,” p. 95.
42. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, p. 9.
43. Quoted in David Brion Davis, “The Problem of Slavery,” in Paquette and Ferleger, Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, p. 22.
44. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, p. 30.
45. Becker, Declaration of Independence, pp. 239–40; Thelen, “Reception of the Declaration of Independence,” in Gerber, Declaration of Independence, p. 206.
2. Pursued by the Black Horse
1. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, p. 63.
2. Ibid., pp. 62–65. The severe 1772 storm is known as the “Washington-Jefferson Storm” because both men recorded it in their notes.
3. A family named Eppes had owned Elizabeth Hemings, and she came into Wayles’s possession, aged about eleven, when he married Martha Eppes, his first wife: Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, pp. 68, 118. The name of Elizabeth Hemings’s mother is believed to be Parthena. Barbara Heath came to this conclusion by analyzing the names of Betty Hemings’s children and grandchildren, noting the appearance of Thena and Thenia, common nicknames for Parthena. She then found “Parthena” among the Wayles slaves.
4. In his memoir the blacksmith Isaac Granger remarked, “Folks said that these Hemingses was old Mr. Wayles’s children.” Sally Hemings’s son Madison said the same thing: “Elizabeth Hemings grew to womanhood in the family of John Wales, whose wife dying she (Elizabeth) was taken by the widower Wales as his concubine, by whom she had six children—three sons and three daughters, viz.: Robert, James, Peter, Critty, Sally and Thena. These children went by the name of Hemings.” The overseer Edmund Bacon said that the Hemingses were “old family servants and great favorites.” Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 4.
5. TJ to Archibald Thweatt, May 29, 1810, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 2.
6. Ibid.
7. Stanton, Free Some Day, p. 19.
8. Ibid., pp. 21–22.
9. Farm Book, plates 5–9.
10. TJ wrote the names of the white workers Fossett, Nelson, Rise, and Walker.
11. McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, p. 101; “Monticello: stone house (slave quarters), recto, September 1770, by Thomas Jefferson,” N38; K16 (electronic edition), Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive. The individuals mentioned included Jenny, Suck, Scilla, Dinah, and Ursula.
12. Kelso, Archaeology at Monticello, pp. 64, 96; McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, pp. 143–45.
13. TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., Oct. 19, 1792, in Papers, vol. 24.
14. McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, p. 188.
16. Bear, Jefferson and Monticello, p. 3.
17. Vail, De la littérature et des hommes de lettres des États Unis d’Amérique. I am grateful to Jane Foster for her translation of the Vail account.
18. Langhorne, “Black Music and Tales from Jefferson’s Monticello,” p. 60.
19. Bear, Jefferson and Monticello, p. 3.
20. Ibid., p. 5.
21. Hemings, “Life Among the Lowly.”
22. Thomas Jefferson Randolph Memoirs, version 2, no. 1397.
23. Freedman’s Friend, Dec. 1868.
24. Kranish, Flight from Monticello, p. 266.
25. Ibid., p. 283.
26. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, pp. 337–39.
27. Kranish, Flight from Monticello, p. 286.
28. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 8.
3. “We Lived Under a Hidden Law”
1. TJ to James Madison, May 25, 1810, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 2.
2. TJ to D’Anmours, Nov. 30, 1780, in Papers, vol. 4.
3. Wilson, “Evolution of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.”
4. McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, p. 115.
5. Virginia Gazette, Aug. 20, 1772, p. 1, http://research.history.org/DigitalLibrary/VirginiaGazette/VGbyYear.cfm. Also quoted in Boulton, “American Paradox,” p. 470.
6. Notes on the State of Virginia. All direct quotations from Notes in this chapter are from the searchable UVA etext: http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html.
7. Mill, Basic Writings, p. 134.
8. Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation, pp. 1–2, 4–5.
9. Ibid., pp. 6–7, 17–19; Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People, p. 196. As he often did, TJ contrived to have things both ways. Having thrown in his lot with the reactionaries in the 1780s, he retroactively denounced them in 1814 as benighted, self-interested people from whom “nothing was to be hoped.” He said they cared only for property rights and looked upon black people as animals. TJ to Edward Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7.