Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  His landed assets were impressive, but deceptively so. Jefferson owned nearly eleven thousand acres, about equally divided between estates surrounding Monticello in Albemarle County and western lands concentrated in Bedford County, about ninety miles away. He had sold off additional acreage lying along the James River to the southeast in Goochland and Cumberland counties, in part to pay off debts and in part to consolidate his holdings. Despite the sale, Jefferson remained one of the largest landowners in the state. One of the reasons he found it difficult to accept the full implications of his indebtedness was that he thought of wealth like an old-style Virginia aristocrat, in terms of land rather than money or more liquid forms of capital. For Jefferson, land was the best measure of a man’s worth and, as he put it, “that of which I am the most tenacious.” Despite the haunting presence of his English and Scottish creditors, he thought of himself as a landed and therefore a wealthy man.36

  He expected the land to rescue him from those creditors once he took personal charge of managing its cultivation. His plan was clear. He would abandon tobacco as his chief cash crop in favor of wheat. In his Notes on Virginia he had described tobacco growing as “a culture productive of infinite wretchedness,” in part because the noxious weed served no earthly purpose other than to feed a nasty habit, but also because the plant possessed an almost unique capacity to kill the land. Because his own lands were, as he put it, “as yet reclaimed from the barbarous state in which the slovenly business of tobacco making had left them,” he would insist upon the adoption of a seven-step long-term plan of crop rotation designed to permit the soil to recover its former fertility. Throughout the spring and summer of 1794 Jefferson focused the bulk of his considerable energies on the details of his seven-step rotation plan, giving it all the concentrated attention he had previously given to American domestic politics or foreign policy.37

  At least at the theoretical level, which was where Jefferson always did his most impressive thinking, his plan had much to recommend it. Wheat was becoming the crop of choice among Virginia’s more progressive planters (Washington had helped lead the way here) because it did less damage to the soil and enjoyed several market advantages over tobacco, the chief ones being that people needed to eat more than they needed to smoke and that the ongoing war between England and France presented a golden opportunity to capture the European market for foodstuffs. The elaborateness of his seven-step rotation program meant that it would take a long time, at least seven years, before his fields were fully ready for extensive wheat cultivation, but that seemed a price worth paying to do the job right. The plan provides additional evidence that Jefferson saw himself as remaining at Monticello for the duration. He was planning for the long haul.

  Of all the reasons why the plan failed—and after some initial success it did fail in just about every way possible—perhaps the main culprit was the bane of all farmers: bad weather and bad luck. Droughts and early frosts damaged Jefferson’s wheat crop three years in succession. Heavy rains soaked his grain while it was being shipped by barge downriver. Later on the dreaded Hessian fly settled over his fields at regular intervals, consuming whatever had managed to survive the capricious elements. One cannot read through his Farm Book, where Jefferson recorded his seasonal encounters with the vagaries of the weather and the countless impediments to his best-laid plans, without concluding that however fortunate he was as a public figure, he was an extremely unlucky farmer.38

  Beyond bad luck, however, there were two elemental reasons why Jefferson’s plantations were not really capable of producing cash crops at a level sufficient to generate substantial profits. First, he simply did not have enough land under cultivation. When one conjures up the image of an eleven-thousand-acre plantation, it is difficult not to be influenced by the popular iconography of the huge agrarian factories of the antebellum South with their vast fields and gangs of slave laborers organized in quasi-military units. But Jefferson’s lands, and indeed most of Virginia’s plantations in the eighteenth century, did not look or function at all like that. Instead of one large tract stretching out to the horizon, Jefferson owned seven separate and disparate farms: Monticello, Shadwell, Tufton and Lego in Albemarle County; and Poplar Forest, Bear Creek and Tomahawk in Bedford. Moreover, only about a thousand acres of his total holdings were under cultivation. The rest was forest. In effect, Jefferson did not oversee a unified plantation in the familiar sense of the term so much as a series of modest-sized farms. Taken together, these scattered agrarian communities were capable of producing enough corn, oats, potatoes, rye, peas, barley and flax to support themselves and, in good years, to show a small profit. That in fact is what they managed to do year in and year out. But the acreage under cultivation was too small, and the organization of the enterprise too decentralized to permit much more.39

  Second, the land Jefferson owned lacked the nutrients and the corresponding fertility necessary to produce a bumper cash crop. Even if the weather and the fates had been kinder, they would have had a difficult time overcoming the geological realities. Jefferson liked to blame the poor quality of his soil on the exhausting effects of tobacco and the careless management of his lands by overseers during his absence in France and Philadelphia. This was true enough, but it failed to acknowledge the more elemental fact that his plantations were on the eastern slope of a mountain range. Aesthetically and visually this location could claim few equals, commanding a spectacular view from Monticello east toward the Tidewater. But though it looked down on some of the richest soil in Virginia, the very height that made the view so stunning also made the soil inferior for purposes of cultivation. (If he had had access to twentieth-century fertilizers and farming techniques, things might have been different. Modern farmers in the area earn their livings with livestock.) So while Jefferson preferred to believe that his lands had been worn out—this meant that proper care by means of a meticulous crop rotation system could reclaim their fertility—the less palatable truth was that the soil lacked the basic nutrients essential for a flourishing plantation economy. The ground around Monticello, for example, was clay-based and therefore excellent for making bricks, but even as one admires the distinctive dark-red hues of the mansion facade today, one is also looking at another underlying reason why Jefferson was not destined to be a successful farmer.40

  Although Jefferson never fully grasped the intractability of his economic predicament, he had a sharp sense of the need to generate income, presumably to tide him over until his lands recovered their productivity, so he decided early on to establish a nail-making business on the grounds of Monticello. He described his reasoning in a letter to a French correspondent in the spring of 1795: “In returning home after an absence of ten years, I found my farms so much deranged that I saw evidently… that it was necessary for me to find some other resource in the meantime… . I concluded at length to begin a manufacture of nails, which needs little or no capital, and I now employ a dozen little boys from 10 to 16 years of age, overlooking all the details of their business myself and drawing from it profit on which I can get along till I can put my farms into a course of yielding profit.” He joked about his new occupation as manufacturer and factory foreman, claiming that “my new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe,” but he was deadly serious about supervising the operation personally and enforcing a rigid regimen for the teenage black slaves who constituted his labor force.

  Every morning except Sunday he walked over to the nailery soon after dawn to weigh out the nail rod for each worker, then returned at dusk to weigh the nails each had made and calculate how much iron had been wasted by the most and least efficient workers. Isaac Jefferson recalled that his former master made it clear to all hands that the nailery was a personal priority and that special privileges would be accorded the best nailmakers. “[He] gave the boys in the nail factory a pound of meat a week… . Give them that wukked the best a suit of red or blue; encouraged them mig
htily.” Jefferson even added the nailery to his familiar refrain in the pastoral mode. “I am so much immersed in farming and nail-making,” he reported in the fall of 1794, “that politicks are entirely banished from my mind.” He also immersed himself in the business side of nail making, demanding cheaper prices from his nail rod supplier in Philadelphia, noting increases in the price of iron, keeping track of retail sales of his product at local stores and worrying when “a deluge of British nails” flooded the local market “with a view as is said of putting down my work.” (The fact that they were British nails meant that he took it personally.)41

  From a financial perspective the nailery made perfect sense. In fact, in terms of his struggle to make his plantations profitable, the nailery was the one success story, earning almost a thousand dollars in a good year. But seen in the context of Jefferson’s eloquent hymn to the bucolic beauties of the pastoral life, it was a massive incongruity. A historian with the ironic sensibility of, say, Henry Adams could have a field day contemplating the symbolic significance of a small factory, perched atop Monticello in the heart of Jefferson’s agrarian utopia, perhaps concluding that it was America’s original version of “the machine in the garden.” Or a novelist with the temperament of Charles Dickens might have taken delight in comparing the regimen of Jefferson’s nailery with the sweatshops and dawn-to-dusk drudgery of London’s satanic mills. Jefferson himself, it should be noted, had no comparable sense of irony or contradiction; he felt no need to apologize for bringing industry to Monticello. There is no evidence that it ever occurred to him that his daily visits to the nail factory, with its blazing forges and sweating black boys arranged along an assembly line of hammers and anvils, offered a graphic preview of precisely the kind of industrial world he devoutly wished America to avoid, or at least to delay for as long as possible.42

  At a more mundane level Jefferson’s dedication to the meticulous management of the nailery illustrates what compelled his fullest energies as master of Monticello. Both ex-slave Madison Hemings and former overseer Edmund Bacon, though recalling a later time in his life, claimed that Jefferson showed “but little taste or care for agricultural pursuits… . It was his mechanics he seemed mostly to direct, and in their operations he took great interest.” Though his first year of retirement in 1794–95 appears to have been an exception, his general rule was to pass little time in his fields, preferring to leave their cultivation to his overseers except at harvesttime. He spent no time at all behind a plow and almost no time watching others perform the routine tasks of farming. What most fascinated him and commanded his fullest attention were new projects that demanded mechanical or artisanal skill of his laborers and that allowed him to design and superintend the entire operation. The nailery was the first of such projects, but it was followed by construction of a new threshing machine, plans for a flour mill and an expensive canal in the Rivanna River.43

  But the biggest project of all was Monticello itself. He had in fact been contemplating a major overhaul of his mansion ever since his return from France in 1789. From a financial point of view the idea of renovating Monticello, unlike his plans for the nailery, made no sense at all. But when it came to the elegance and comfort of his personal living space, Jefferson’s lifelong habit was to ignore cost altogether, often going so far as to make expensive architectural changes in houses or hotels where he was only a temporary resident. His much grander plans for Monticello followed naturally from two idealistic impulses that seized his imagination with all the force of first principles: First, he needed more space, more than twice that of the original house, in order to accommodate his domestic dream of living out his life surrounded by his children and grandchildren; second, his revised version of Monticello needed to embody the neoclassical principles of the Palladian style that his European travels had allowed him to study firsthand. The conjunction of these two cravings had drastic implications, since the spatial expansion had to occur within severely constrained conceptions of symmetry and proportion dictated by the Palladian principles for beauty. The new structure could not just spread out like a series of boxcars, but neither could it rise vertically, since Palladian buildings must present at least the appearance of a one-story horizontal line, preferably capped by a dome. What this meant in effect was that the original house needed to be almost completely demolished and rebuilt from the cellar up.44

  Brick-making started soon after his return home in 1794, but throughout that year and the next Jefferson focused most of his energies on his fields and the nailery. Some construction work must have begun right away, since Jefferson reported to George Wythe in October 1794 that he was “now living in a brick-kiln, for my house, in its present state is nothing more.” But a year and a half later, in March 1796, he informed William Branch Giles that he had “just begun the demolition of my house,” adding that Giles should “not let this discourage you from calling on us if you wander this way in the summer” and joking that he could stay in one of the unfinished, open-air rooms. An Irish traveler passing through in May of the same year described Monticello as “in an unfinished state, but if carried to the plan laid down, it will be one of the most elegant private habitations in the United States.” Visits by two Frenchmen provide us with the only other direct testimony about the physical condition of life on the mountaintop at this time. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt tended to overlook the clutter and, like a good Jeffersonian, describe the promise: “His travels in Europe have supplied him with models; he has appropriated them to his design; and his new plan, which is already much advanced, will be accomplished before the end of next year… .” (He was off by twelve or twenty-six years, depending on how one calculates completion.) Count François de Volney, another refugee from the French Revolution who wished to visit, received a welcoming note from Jefferson that included more candid advice about the view that would greet him: “[T]he noise, confusion and discomfort of the scene will require all your philosophy and patience.”45

  Throughout the vast bulk of Jefferson’s sequestration, it seems clear, Monticello was a congested construction site replete with broken bricks, roofless rooms, lumber piles and, if some reports are to be believed, more than a hundred workmen digging, tearing and hammering away. The millions of twentieth-century visitors to the mansion are the real beneficiaries of Jefferson’s irrational decision to redesign and rebuild Monticello in the 1790s, though they would be mistaken to think the house in which Jefferson lived looked the way it does now. It was in some state of repair or improvement throughout Jefferson’s lifetime. More to our purposes, from 1794 to 1797 Monticello was part ruin, part shell and mostly still dream. Not only is it wrong to envision Jefferson’s estates as an integrated agrarian enterprise along the lines of Tara in Gone with the Wind, not only is it misguided to imagine Jefferson walking behind a plow or spending much time supervising others walking behind a plow, but it is also misleading to think of him residing in a palatial home shaped by his distinctive tastes and filled with his favorite curiosities. Monticello was an excavation rather than a mansion at this stage. It was also his largest and most all-consuming project, the activity that soaked up his best energies and provided him with a sense of purpose. While his inspirational hymn to the virtuous farmer was unquestionably genuine, the truth was that farming bored him. Retirement to rural solitude did not mean tilling the soil, but digging it up to build something new and useful on it.

  SLAVERY

  ALMOST ALL THE WORK, whether in the fields, in the nailery or at the construction site for Monticello itself was done by slaves. The total slave population on Jefferson’s several plantations was a fluctuating figure, oscillating above and below 200 and divided between Albemarle and Bedford counties at the ratio of roughly three to two. Between 1784 and 1794, as Jefferson attempted to consolidate his landholdings and reduce his debt, he had disposed of 161 slaves by sale or outright gift. But natural increase had raised the slave population on all his estates to 167 by 1796, and that number was to grow gradually ov
er the ensuing years. On his plantations in Albemarle County it would seem safe to estimate that Jefferson was surrounded by about 100 slaves during his three-year retirement. It is, on the other hand, by no means safe to estimate Jefferson’s thoughts and feelings about what in effect constituted the overwhelming majority of residents at Monticello.46

  Although Jefferson had made extended visits to Monticello during his years as secretary of state, his duties in Paris and before then in Philadelphia and Williamsburg meant that he was mostly an absentee slaveowner for the better part of fifteen years. During that time his views on the institution of slavery had fluctuated in much the same way as the size of his own slave population, oscillating between outright condemnation of slavery as incompatible with republican values and equally outright procrastination when pushed to offer practical remedies to end it. Of course the gap between “what ought to be” and “what the world allowed” constituted the central dilemma of Jefferson’s overall cast of mind on almost all political topics. But the problem of slavery exposed the gap more dramatically than any other issue; it also exposed his intellectual awkwardness in attempting to straddle what was in fact a moral chasm between what he knew to be right and what he could not do without. Even at the purely theoretical level, then, his thinking about slavery as a matter of public policy was deeply paradoxical and tinctured with personal considerations. The return to Monticello in 1794 and his apparently permanent encampment among “those who labor for my happiness” put an even sharper edge on the paradox by making the theoretical problem into a palpable, day-by-day set of personal interactions.47