Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (17 page)

And then, one day at the beginning of Jefferson's second term as president, Hubbard vanished. For years he had patiently carried out an elaborate deception, pretending to be the loyal, hardworking slave. He had done all that hard work not to soften a life in slavery but to escape it. The clothing was not for show; it was a disguise.

Hubbard had been gone for many weeks when the president received a letter from the sheriff of Fairfax County. He had in custody a man named Hubbard who had confessed to being an escaped slave. In his confession Hubbard revealed the details of his escape. He had made a deal with Wilson Lilly, son of the overseer Gabriel Lilly, paying him $5 and an overcoat in exchange for false emancipation documents and a travel pass to Washington. But illiteracy was Hubbard's downfall: he did not realize that the documents Wilson Lilly had written were not very persuasive.
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When Hubbard reached Fairfax County, about a hundred miles north of Monticello, the sheriff stopped him and demanded to see his papers. The sheriff knew forgeries when he saw them and arrested Hubbard. The sheriff asked Jefferson for a reward because he had run “a great Risk” arresting “as large a fellow as he is.”

Hubbard was returned to Monticello. If he received some punishment for his escape, there is no record of it. In fact, it seems that Hubbard was forgiven and regained Jefferson's trust within a year. The October 1806 schedule of work for the nailery shows Hubbard working with the heaviest gauge of rod with a daily output of fifteen pounds of nails. That Christmas, Jefferson allowed him to travel from Monticello to Poplar Forest to see his family.
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Jefferson may have trusted him again, but Bacon remained wary.

One day when Bacon was trying to fill an order for nails, he found that the entire stock of eight-penny nails—three hundred pounds of nails worth $50—was gone: “of course they had been stolen.” He immediately suspected James Hubbard and confronted him, but Hubbard “denied it powerfully.” Bacon ransacked Hubbard's cabin and “every place I could think of” but came up empty-handed. Despite the lack of evidence, Bacon remained convinced of Hubbard's guilt. He conferred with the white manager of the nailery, Reuben Grady: “Let us drop it. He has hid them somewhere, and if we say no more about it, we shall find them.”

Walking through the woods after a heavy rain, Bacon spotted muddy tracks on the leaves on one side of the path. He followed the tracks to their end, where he found the nails buried in a large box. Immediately, he went up the mountain to inform Jefferson of the discovery and of his certainty that Hubbard was the thief. Jefferson was “very much surprised and felt very badly about it” because Hubbard “had always been a favorite servant.” Jefferson said he would question Hubbard personally the next morning when he went on his usual ride past Bacon's house.

When Jefferson showed up the next day, Bacon had Hubbard called in. At the sight of his master, Hubbard burst into tears. Bacon wrote, “I never saw any person, white or black, feel as badly as he did when he saw his master. He was mortified and distressed beyond measure…. We all had confidence in him. Now his character was gone.”

Hubbard tearfully begged Jefferson's pardon “over and over again.” For a slave, burglary was a capital crime. A runaway slave who once broke into Bacon's private storehouse and stole three pieces of bacon and a bag of cornmeal was condemned to hang in Albemarle County. The governor commuted his sentence, and the slave was “transported,” the legal term for being sold by the state to the Deep South or the West Indies.
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And even Bacon felt moved by Hubbard's plea—“I felt very badly myself”—but he knew what would come next: Hubbard had to be whipped. So Bacon was astonished when Jefferson turned to him and said, “Ah, sir, we can't punish him. He has suffered enough already.” Jefferson offered some counsel to Hubbard, “gave him a heap of good advice,” and sent him back to the nailery, where Reuben Grady was waiting, “expecting…to whip him.”

Jefferson's magnanimity seemed to spark a conversion in Hubbard. When he got to the nailery, he told Grady he'd been seeking religion for a long time, “but I never heard anything before that sounded so, or made me feel so, as I did when master said, ‘Go, and don't do so any more.'” So now he was “determined to seek religion till I find it.” Bacon said, “sure enough, he afterwards came to me for a permit to go and be baptized.”
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But that, too, was deception. On his authorized absences from the plantation to attend church, Hubbard made arrangements for another escape.

During the holiday season in late 1810, Hubbard vanished again, and his story plays out like a wartime tale—one deception piled on another, clandestine meetings and deals, forged identity papers, a desperate flight through a hostile countryside. The documents about Hubbard's escape reveal that Jefferson's plantations were riven with secret networks. Jefferson had at least one spy in the slave community who was willing to inform on his fellow slaves for cash; Jefferson wrote that he “engaged a trusty negro man of my own, and promised him a reward…if he could inform us so that [Hubbard] should be taken.” But the spy could not get anyone to talk. Jefferson wrote that Hubbard “has not been heard of.” But that was not true: a few people
had
heard of Hubbard's movements. Jefferson could not crack the wall of silence at Monticello, but an informer at Poplar Forest told the overseer that a boatman belonging to Colonel Randolph aided Hubbard's escape, clandestinely ferrying him up the James River from Poplar Forest to the area around Monticello, even though the white patrollers of two or three counties were hunting the fugitive.
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The boatman might have been part of a network that plied the Rivanna and James Rivers, smuggling goods and fugitives.

Possibly, Hubbard tried to make contact with friends around Monticello; possibly, he was planning to flee to the North again; possibly, it was all disinformation planted by Hubbard's friends. At some point Hubbard headed
southwest
, not north, across the Blue Ridge. He made his way to the town of Lexington, where he was able to live for over a year as a free man, being in possession of an impeccable, genuine manumission document.

His description appeared in the Richmond
Enquirer
:

A year after his escape Hubbard was spotted in Lexington. Before he could be captured, he took off again, heading farther west into the Allegheny Mountains, but Jefferson put a slave tracker on his trail. Cornered and clapped in irons, Hubbard was brought back to Monticello, where Jefferson made an example of him: “I had him severely flogged in the presence of his old companions, and committed to jail.” Under the lash Hubbard revealed the details of his escape and the name of an accomplice; he had been able to elude capture by carrying genuine manumission papers he'd bought from a free black man in Albemarle County. The man who provided Hubbard with the papers spent six months in jail.
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Jefferson sold Hubbard to one of his overseers, and his final fate is not known.

A plantation's borders might seem porous, making escape easy, so the question arises: Why didn't more slaves try to run away? Did they actually prefer the life of slavery? But they lived as if in an occupied country. As Hubbard discovered, few could outrun the newspaper ads, the slave patrols, the vigilant sheriffs demanding papers, and the slave-catching bounty hunters with their guns and dogs. Hubbard was brave or desperate enough to try it twice, unmoved by the incentives Jefferson held out to cooperative, diligent, industrious slaves.

 

Throughout his narrative Bacon said nothing unpleasant about slavery; his memoir purified it. A historian who studied Bacon said he “lacked a certain discrimination,” and saw in him the New World version of old England's “Plain Country Fellow”: “He is sensible of no calamity but the burning of a stack of corn or the overflowing of a meadow, and thinks Noah's Flood the greatest plague that ever was, not because it drowned the world, but spoiled the grass.”
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Bacon so profoundly admired Jefferson that his idolatry became something of a joke among his fellow overseers, one of whom said to him, “Well, I believe if Mr. Jefferson told you to go into the fire, you would follow his instructions.”
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He filtered his memories of Monticello through the lens of admiration; he could not help himself, because the process was reflexive, unconscious. Merely in describing Jefferson's physical appearance, Bacon suddenly veered into a hymn: “His skin was very clear and pure—just like he was in principle.”
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Thus Bacon told the story of James Hubbard's trial and Jefferson's forgiveness to illustrate a point about Jefferson's character:

But in trying to suggest that punishment was virtually nonexistent under Jefferson, Bacon inadvertently reveals that it was routine—there stands Reuben Grady with the whip, prepared to dispense “the chastising that was customary”—and he reveals how Jefferson distanced himself from the ugly reality of his system. When Jefferson had personally to authorize the whipping of Hubbard, face-to-face, he shrank from it. And Jefferson's pardon amazed Grady, who “was astonished to see [Hubbard] come back and go to work after such a crime.”
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On one level Bacon's memoir offers a vivid picture of the decline and fall of an old order. As the financial shadows gather and deepen, Bacon wrings his hands over Jefferson's struggles and misjudgments. But we also see the Jeffersonian vision surviving in Bacon, who embodies the rising new man of the South, the “yeoman farmer” Jefferson idealized. He expressed Jefferson's philosophy in humble terms, writing to the sage himself in 1819, “I consider it of such importance that every person who has a family should have a home and that should be of such soil as will produce well.”
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He omitted to mention slaves, but his memoir reveals the plain country fellow gathering human assets at bargain rates from the depleted aristocrats as he patiently lays plans for his own slave-driven plantation in Kentucky.

In his interview with the Reverend Pierson, Bacon took the opportunity to settle some old scores and as an aside leaked more revealing information. He despised the Randolphs and mocked them mercilessly. He had to compete with two generations of them for control of Monticello—Jefferson's son-in-law Colonel Randolph and the colonel's son Jeff Randolph—and he clearly did not like being second-guessed by them. “The Randolphs were all strange people,” he declared.
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In one of his rants against the family, this time against Colonel Randolph for his inability to control his finances, Bacon said, “I often loaned him money,” and when the colonel was stuck, “he would be obliged to sell some of his Negroes.”

On one such occasion the colonel sent an urgent note to Bacon by a slave messenger saying that he needed $150 in cash by the next day, a necessity that compelled him against his will to offer Bacon a slave from the Edgehill plantation. Overnight Bacon raised the cash. He was quite proud of his capacity, on a few hours' notice, to put cash on the barrel when the haughty Randolphs were strapped. He made the deal the next day and told the Reverend Pierson all about it: indeed, he still had the receipt!
Let me show it to you, Reverend.
As he unfolded the paper, Bacon said, “She was a little girl four years old.”
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Her name was Edy, daughter of Fennel. The transaction was done in a trice; no hole on the mountain could hide the child.

 

Leaving the site of Bacon's house, we tramped into a ravine and then up again, following the Fourth Roundabout, cut into a hillside below a field. Neiman told me that the Third Roundabout was above us, running along the edge of what had been a field in Jefferson's time. He abruptly turned off the path and clambered up the slope. He paused at a tall poplar and pointed to the ground, where I could see some rocks scattered about. Nothing much here, I thought.

“These rocks are the hearth of Betty Hemings's house.”

The poplar had long ago taken root in the middle of the hearth and broken it apart, leaving the scatter of stones in an otherwise empty forest near the edge of a field. It was not a terribly impressive site, but for some reason I found it very moving.

“We worked on this site the first summer I was here,” Neiman said. “Jefferson actually mapped it, and we were able to locate it on the cheap.” By “on the cheap” he meant they didn't have to dig a hundred empty holes before hitting it. On his arrival at Monticello, Neiman had looked at Jefferson's maps of the mountain and noticed a small square with the label “B.Hem” written in Jefferson's hand. The map was so accurate that it was a simple thing for the archaeology team to follow it right to Hemings's house and dig it up.
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