Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  13. Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 182n5.

  14. There was a tradition among some African-American families from Charlottesville that Harriet returned there after TJ’s death and started a family, but the evidence they offered in the 1940s is extremely garbled and calls for further research. Pearl Graham, Notes on an Interview with Three Descendants of Thomas Jefferson, July 28, 1948, typescript graciously provided by Lucia Stanton. Graham, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,” pp. 98–100. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 554–55n47.

  15. Quotation from Cleveland American, reprinted in Liberator, Dec. 19, 1845, in Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 165.

  16. Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 164.

  17. “A Sprig of Jefferson Was Eston Hemings,” Scioto Gazette, Aug. 1, 1902, quoted in Frontline website “Jefferson’s Blood,” www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/cron/1902sprig.html, also quoted in Leary, “Sally Hemings’s Children,” pp. 172–73. According to this account, which appeared nearly fifty years after Eston’s death, “There came from Monticello, Virginia, to Chillicothe, a remarkably fine looking colored man and his family. Eston Hemings was of a light bronze color, a little over six feet tall, well proportioned, very erect and dignified; his nearly straight hair showed a tint of auburn.”

  18. Fawn M. Brodie, “Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren,” Getting Word: The Newsletter (Winter 2007/2008), p. 2.

  19. “Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp,” Sept. 29, 1917, p. 4; Sept. 30, 1917, p. 3.

  20. Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 169.

  21. Ibid., p. 162.

  22. Ibid., pp. 166–67.

  23. Ibid., p. 171.

  16. “The Effect on Them Was Electrical”

  1. Petition of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, quoted in Adam Rothman, Slave Country, p. 27.

  2. Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” p. 52; Ress, Governor Edward Coles, pp. 11–17.

  3. Ress, Governor Edward Coles, p. 34.

  4. Monroe, “Edward Coles, Patrician Emancipator,” www.lib.niu.edu/2005/iht1210502.html.

  5. Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” pp. 47–48.

  6. Coles, “Emancipation,” Oct. 1827, p. 1. I am very grateful to Bruce Carveth for generously providing copies of his Coles material. Coles knew he could ease his conscience simply by asking his father for some other property, but he reasoned that the effect would be merely to perpetuate the enslavement of his allotted inheritance “as if I had sold the portion of them which I should otherwise have inherited.”

  7. He considered and abandoned the idea of keeping the freed people in Virginia, evading the removal law “by not having the free papers recorded,” and formalizing the emancipation in his will so that the freed people would be protected in case of his sudden death.

  8. Coles, “Emancipation,” pp. 2–3.

  9. Coles, “Autobiography,” n.p.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Morse, American Geography, pp. 390–91.

  12. Brissot de Warville, quoted in Poole and Buchanan, Anti-Slavery Opinions Before the Year 1800, www.gutenberg.org/files/23956/23956-h/23956-h.htm.

  13. Ress, Governor Edward Coles, pp. 42–43; Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” p. 52.

  14. Coles to TJ, July 31, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7.

  15. TJ to Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7.

  16. Coles to TJ, Sept. 26, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7.

  17. Billy Wayson, lecture, Jefferson Library, International Center for Jefferson Studies, May 2011.

  18. Short to TJ, Feb. 27, 1798, in Papers, vol. 30.

  19. Kosciuszko wrote three more wills in Europe after leaving the United States. These dealt mainly with his property in Europe, though he did decide in 1806 to leave $3,700 from the U.S. funds to his American godson, Kosciuszko Armstrong (son of John Armstrong Jr., U.S. minister to France). He corresponded with TJ in 1817 and reiterated that his intention to free slaves with his American funds remained “fixed.” Kosciuszko believed that his European wills would in no way affect his American will, but TJ’s refusal to execute Kosciuszko’s will left it in limbo, an attractive prize for litigants. Armstrong and other claimants tried and failed to invalidate the emancipation will in a U.S. suit in 1823, giving TJ a second chance, but he did nothing. Two decades later another suit succeeded, and the U.S. will was declared invalid by the Supreme Court. Had TJ acted as his friend had wished, several enslaved families would have been liberated and become landowners in a free state. Mizwa, “Kosciuszko’s ‘Fortune’ in America and What Became of It,” pp. 1–3.

  20. Turner, “Did Jefferson Sleep with Sally Hemings?”

  21. Life and Ancestry of Warner Mifflin, pp. 84, 79, 85.

  22. Freehling, Reintegration of American History, p. 188.

  23. Richard Newman, “Good Communications Corrects Bad Manners,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, p. 77.

  24. Fogel, Slavery Debates, p. 39.

  25. TJ to Benjamin Banneker, Aug. 30, 1791, in Papers, vol. 22.

  26. Foster, Jeffersonian America, pp. 148–49.

  27. TJ to Edmund Bacon, memorandum Fall 1806, in Farm Book, p. 25.

  28. TJ to Grégoire, Feb. 25, 1809, in Peterson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, p. 1202; TJ to Joel Barlow, Oct. 8, 1809, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 1.

  29. TJ to Burwell, Jan. 28, 1805, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation.

  30. Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 347.

  31. TJ to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation.

  32. TJ to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820, in Farm Book, p. 26.

  33. TJ to Joel Yancey, Jan. 17, 1819, in Farm Book, p. 43.

  34. TJ to Lydia Sigourney, July 18, 1824, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation.

  35. Elizabeth Trist to Catharine Wistar Bache, Dec. 28, 1810, Family Letters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., http://retirementseries.dataformat.com.

  36. Scanlon and Gallatin, “A Sudden Conceit,” p. 152.

  17. “Utopia in Full Reality”

  1. Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ellen W. Randolph Coolidge, Aug. 2, 1825, Family Letters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., http://retirementseries.dataformat.com.

  2. Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 161.

  3. Thomas J. Randolph, Speech of Thomas J. Randolph, p. 17.

  4. Baldwin, Cross of Redemption, p. 152.

  5. Notes on the State of Virginia.

  6. TJ to James Monroe, Nov. 24, 1801, in Papers, vol. 35.

  7. Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” pp. 272–73.

  8. McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, p. 125.

  9. Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, p. 48.

  10. Adam Rothman, Slave Country, pp. 24–26.

  11. Ibid., pp. 31–32; Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 345.

  12. Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 347.

  13. Paine to TJ, Jan. 25, 1805; TJ to Paine, June 5, 1805, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

  14. Taylor, From Timbuktu to Katrina, p. 75.

  15. Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, p. 47.

  16. Appleby, Thomas Jefferson, p. 136.

  17. Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, pp. 44–45.

  18. Ibid., pp. 30, 39–47.

  19. Brown, Constitutional History, p. 215.

  20. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, p. 9.

  21. William W. Freehling, “The Louisiana Purchase and the Coming of the Civil War,” in Levin
son and Sparrow, Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, pp. 72–73.

  22. William Cabell Rives to James Madison, April 18, 1833, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-02-02-02-2721.

  23. TJ to Joel Yancey, Jan. 17, 1819, in Farm Book, p. 43.

  24. TJ to Jeremiah Goodman, Nov. 30, 1815, July 20, 1817, in Farm Book, pp. 40–41.

  25. Taylor, “American Abyss,” p. 390.

  26. Quoted in Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets, p. 142.

  27. Ludwig von Mises, letter to Ayn Rand, Jan. 23, 1958, http://hessenflow.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/ludwig-von-mises-letter-to-ayn-rand/; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 975.

  28. Interview with Joseph Ellis. www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/interviews/ellis.html.

  29. TJ to William Short, April 13, 1800, in Papers, vol. 31.

  30. Hochman, “Thomas Jefferson,” pp. 223–25. The historian Billy Wayson remarked to me that TJ was “a genius at finance.” He tapped numerous supplies of credit, including the banks he professed to loathe, and skillfully juggled and refinanced his loans.

  31. Ibid., p. 238; Sloan, Principle and Interest, p. 11.

  32. Israel Jefferson quoted in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 481.

  33. Stanton, Free Some Day, pp. 144–45.

  34. Isaac Granger said: “Sally had a son named Madison, who learned to be a great fiddler. He has been in Petersburg twice: was here when the balloon went up—the balloon that Beverly sent off.” Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 4.

  35. Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, January 8, 1835.

  18. Jefferson Anew

  1. In the 1790s he purchased the side of the adjacent mountain, Montalto, that could be seen from Monticello, cleared its trees, planted meadows, and set sheep to grazing there to create a pastoral vista.

  2. Bon-Harper, “Contrasting Worlds,” pp. 4–5.

  3. Peterson, Jefferson Image in the American Mind, p. 49.

  4. TJ to Robert Pleasants, Aug. 27, 1796, in Papers, vol. 29.

  5. Boulton, “American Paradox,” p. 473.

  6. Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals, p. 35.

  7. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, pp. 156, 176.

  8. Peter S. Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy,” in Boles and Hall, Seeing Jefferson Anew, p. 14.

  9. Kevin Butterfield, Review of Boles, John B.; Hall, Randal L., eds., Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. April 2011. www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31509.

  10. Walter Johnson, “Inconsistency, Contradiction, and Complete Confusion: The Everyday Life of the Law of Slavery,” Law & Social Inquiry 22, no. 2 (Spring 1997), p. 413.

  11. Foster, Jeffersonian America, p. 149. Also quoted in Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness,” in Onuf, Jeffersonian Legacies, p. 163.

  12. Onuf, “Scholars’ Jefferson,” p. 675.

  13. Ellis, American Sphinx, p. 104.

  14. David Brooks, “The Great Seduction,” New York Times, June 10, 2008.

  15. “Jefferson Lottery,” Monticello.org.

  16. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, pp. 23, 538, 149, 535, 534.

  17. Johnson, “On Agency”; Morris, “Articulation of Two Worlds.”

  18. Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, p. 405.

  19. Phillips, American Negro Slavery, pp. 184–85.

  20. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, p. 232.

  21. TJ to David Bailey Warden, Dec. 26, 1820, in Ford, Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12.

  22. TJ to Charles Pinckney, Sept. 30, 1820, in Ford, Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12; TJ to Thomas Cooper, Sept. 10, 1814, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation.

  23. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, p. 23.

  24. In an essay about the implications of the DNA tests that linked TJ to Sally Hemings, Gordon Wood writes of the national “symbolic memory,” saying that “distortions of heritage are precisely what many people want and perhaps need in order to keep the past alive and meaningful. We critical historians thus tamper with popular heritage at our peril.” Gordon Wood, “The Ghosts of Monticello,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, pp. 31–32.

  Bibliography

  Jefferson’s Papers

  Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Thomas Jefferson’s letters and other papers are to the online, electronic edition: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, ed. Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008). This digital edition is available on the website “The Founders Online” through the National Archives at http://founders.archives.gov/. The text of the digital edition is arranged chronologically, making page-number citations unnecessary. Citations will give the item’s date and volume number. This edition, still in progress, does not yet include all of Jefferson’s papers.

  Jefferson’s orthography has vexed modern editors. My extracts from Jefferson’s writings generally preserve his unorthodox spelling and his preference for lowercase letters at the start of sentences. In some instances I have capitalized words for readability and clarity of meaning.

  Most of Jefferson’s original papers are held at the Library of Congress. Images of these documents, and some transcriptions, are available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/.

  The Massachusetts Historical Society also holds a major collection of Jefferson’s papers. The society has placed online Jefferson’s Farm Book, architectural drawings, and other papers in a searchable edition with images of the original pages: Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003), http://www.thomasjeffersonpapers.org/.

  Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1953), includes a facsimile of the original Farm Book along with several hundred pages of selected papers. Citations to the facsimile are denoted by plate numbers; citations to papers are denoted by page numbers. The original Farm Book is in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. For unknown reasons at an unknown time by an unknown person, numerous leaves of the original Farm Book were removed, including an extremely important page (p. 25) listing slaves sold or given away by Jefferson. This page and others have surfaced in other collections.

  Other Jefferson papers, as well as many important papers of his extended family, are in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. It is useful to consult “A Calendar of the Jefferson Papers of the University of Virginia,” http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=uva-sc/viu00007.xml.

  Citations to “Ford” are to the online publication: The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, Federal Edition (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–5); http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1734&Itemid=28; http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1734.

  Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903), Google Books. Print source: Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984).

  All quotations from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia are taken from the searchable online edition: http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html. Print source: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. David Waldstreicher (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002).

  Madison Hemings Memoir

  The only completely reliable source for this text is an image of the original newspaper article “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1,” Pike County (Ohio) Republican, March 13, 1873. A partial image is available at www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/images/vc11.jpg. The transcription in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 471–76, is the most reliable in print, although it does contain
errors. The transcription in Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, contains errors and drops two sentences, garbling the meaning of important passages. Several sources reproduce the erroneous Gordon-Reed text of the Hemings memoir: Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, app. A, pp. 255–58; the Frontline website “Jefferson’s Blood”; and the printed version of the 2000 Monticello Hemings report. Corrections can be found in Coates, Jefferson-Hemings Myth, pp. 182–88, partially online at www.tjheritage.org/Jeffersondocuments.html.

  Books and Dissertations

  Adams, William Howard. Jefferson’s Monticello. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983.

  ———. The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

  Appleby, Joyce. Thomas Jefferson. New York: Times Books, 2003.

  Baldwin, James. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan. New York: Vintage, 2011.

  Bear, James A., Jr., ed. Jefferson at Monticello. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1967.

  Bear, James A., Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

  Becker, Carl. The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.

  Beiswanger, William L. Monticello in Measured Drawings. Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1998.

  Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

  ———. Many Thousands Gone. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

  Bleser, Carol, ed. In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

  Boles, John B., and Randal L. Hall, eds. Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.

  Boswell, James, and John Wilson Croker. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. New York: George Dearborn, 1833.

  Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974.