Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (2 page)

The irony is that Jefferson sent his 4 percent formula to George Washington, who freed his slaves precisely because slavery had made human beings into money, like “Cattle in the market,” and this disgusted him.
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Yet Jefferson was right, prescient, about the investment value of slaves. A startling statistic emerged in the 1970s when economists taking a hardheaded look at slavery found that on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved black people, in the aggregate, formed the second most valuable capital asset in the United States. As David Brion Davis sums up their findings: “In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide.”
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The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself. The formula Jefferson had stumbled upon became the engine not only of Monticello but of the entire slaveholding South and the Northern industries, shippers, banks, insurers, and investors who weighed risk against returns and bet on slavery. The words Jefferson used—“their increase”—became magic words.

Jefferson's 4 percent theorem threatens the comforting notion that he had no real awareness of what he was doing, that he was “stuck” with or “trapped” in slavery, an obsolete, unprofitable, burdensome legacy. The date of Jefferson's calculation lines up with the waning of his emancipationist fervor. Ellis is probably right when he speculates that Hemings had something to do with Jefferson's deciding that he could live with slavery, but we must add this corollary: Jefferson began to back away from antislavery just around the time he computed the silent profit of the “peculiar institution.”

 

I suppose that if you squint at this world with one eye closed, you might claim that Jefferson was a progressive master, with training programs and incentive plans calculated to instill good character, diligence, and discipline. But this innovator, a Henry Ford of slavery, presided over a world that was sealed:
Work as hard as you like—there is no way out.

And this world was crueler than we have been led to believe. A letter has recently come to light describing how Monticello's young black boys, “the small ones,” aged ten, eleven, or twelve, were whipped to get them to work in Jefferson's nail factory, whose profits paid the mansion's grocery bills. This passage about children being lashed had been suppressed—deliberately deleted from the published record in the 1953 edition of Jefferson's
Farm Book
, containing five hundred pages of plantation papers and an introduction that asserts, “Jefferson came close to creating on his own plantations the ideal rural community.”
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That edition of the
Farm Book
still serves as a standard reference for research into the way Monticello worked.

Peter Fossett's story suggests that Monticello was a carefully crafted illusion. Fossett was a Hemings and thus enjoyed extraordinary privileges on the mountain. He said that as a child he owned a fancy suit and a silver watch and that “as a matter of fact we did not need to know that we were slaves.” But then came the day when even he, a Hemings, instantly, shockingly, became aware of what he had always been: part of the silent profit, something less than a man and more “like a horse.” In a trice he was devoured, he became money, and his innocent world was gone—it had all been an illusion. The slaves had an expression for this: at any time the master could “put you in his pocket.”
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The sale smashed the illusions that Jefferson's grandson had nurtured about Monticello. Thomas Jefferson was in his grave when the plantation and its people were auctioned, but his grandson Jeff Randolph saw Peter Fossett, his mother, and his siblings go on the block. He wrote a brief, melancholy remark about that day on the mountain when people he had known well, including some who were related to him, were sold and dispersed. He could not shake the emotion of the event, and an image from the remotest past came to him to describe this occasion that should not be occurring: he said it was a scene like “a captured village in ancient times when all were sold as slaves.”
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It is as if he had never thought of these people as slaves until that moment when the auctioneer's hammer came down and they were taken away. The scales fell from his eyes. There were processes at work that Jeff had not quite grasped. He was an owner, a master—he was in charge—but he was one of the “economic overlords of society,” as Reinhold Niebuhr writes, “who wielded a form of power so covert that it betrayed them into sentimental illusions.”
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Nothing at Monticello was straightforward. How could Peter Fossett call Monticello “an earthly paradise” when it was the domain of slavery? In a place where the small ones are whipped, memory finds paths away from a humiliation too terrible to accept. Picture it: your child is lashed and no god raises up a friend but the whole world tells you that you are inferior, that you deserve what you get, that you are serving a Founder.
It is not Jefferson's fault; he is a very great man and we are poor ignorant creatures. No one must ever know.
This was the inner architecture of slavery.

The very existence of slavery in the era of the American Revolution presents a paradox, and we have largely been content to leave it at that, since a paradox can offer a comforting state of moral suspended animation. Oddly enough, embracing paradox has become a badge of tough-minded realism. Thus Joseph Ellis derides a historian whom he labels “neo-abolitionist” for refusing to join him in accepting what he calls the “muddled reality” of the founding era.
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It is an old impulse. When abolitionism was gathering climactic force in the 1850s, Herman Melville put a similarly soothing sentiment on the lips of one of his characters: “The past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it.”
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But Melville wrote with bitter irony.

Jefferson animates the paradox. Somehow he rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into America's national enterprise. This book is about that process.

The thunderstorm that shook the mountain during the telling of Peter Fossett's story passed. We tourists were deposited back into the present, with shafts of sunlight illuminating a peaceful scene—a broad pathway stretching into the distance, disappearing over the curve of the hillside. Jefferson named it Mulberry Row for the fast-growing shade trees he planted here in the 1790s. One thousand yards long, it was the main street of the African-American hamlet atop Monticello Mountain. The plantation was a small town in everything but name, not just because of its size, but in its complexity. Skilled artisans and house slaves occupied cabins on Mulberry Row alongside hired white workers; a few slaves lived in rooms in the mansion's south dependency wing; some slept where they worked. Most of Monticello's slaves lived in clusters of cabins scattered down the mountain and on outlying farms. In his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves. At any one time about 100 slaves lived on the mountain; the highest slave population, in 1817, was 140.
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The labyrinths of Monticello mirror the ambiguities of its maker. As you approach the house, you are taken in by one of Jefferson's cleverest tricks: through the artful arrangement of windows he achieved the illusion of having his three-story building appear to have only one floor. He
had
to have a house like the ones he'd seen in Paris when he was the U.S. minister there. “All the new and good houses are of a single story,” Jefferson said, in the tone of someone who has discovered a new law of physics.

So in the 1790s he tore apart his first house—eight rooms, two floors—and began work on a twenty-one-room mansion, ingeniously concealing its bulk. Its innovations included skylights, indoor privies, and a system of drainpipes and cisterns to capture rainwater. He brainstormed on novel solutions for ventilating smells and smoke, such as tunnels to carry away the odor of the privies and an underground piping system to direct the smoke of cooking fires away from the house. He built the privy tunnels, through which a slave had to crawl once a month, for a dollar, to clean them; he dropped the idea of the underground pipes, considered smokestacks in the shape of obelisks, and finally settled on just having chimneys.
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One feature that Monticello does not have is a grand staircase, usually the centerpiece of a Virginia squire's entrance hall. A waste of space, Jefferson thought, and in any event he didn't need one, because he rarely went upstairs. He had everything he needed in his private, L-shaped suite of rooms on the main floor—the bedroom, the study or “cabinet,” the book room, and the greenhouse, with its access to a private terrace and the lawns. A visitor called this spacious domain Jefferson's “sanctum sanctorum.” His extended family—beloved daughter, impecunious son-in-law, widowed sister, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews—packed themselves into the second and third floors, reached by an extremely narrow, steep, and winding staircase—a treacherous ascent for anyone and doubly dangerous for someone carrying a load or a squirming infant. Jeff Randolph recalled the cramped quarters allotted him as a child: “I slept a whole winter in an outer closet.”
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The granddaughters, desperate for private space where they could read and write, improvised their own sitting room out of an architectural gap over a portico, contending with wasps for control of the room.
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Jefferson grasped the ways geometry talks to the eye and mind, and in his hands that arid specialty yielded visual music. He imparted an uncanny sense of motion to the inanimate mass of bricks, glass, and wood, playing variations on geometrical themes. The facades of Monticello and many of its rooms have no real corners, which puts the eye, expecting right angles, off-balance. (His design for his country retreat, Poplar Forest, which he started in 1806, called for a pure octagon containing a cube.) Today we are accustomed to skylights, but in his time people did not expect to stand indoors in gentle sunlight coming from above, banishing the expected shadows and making others.

So innovative and eccentric in its irregularities and geometric illusions, Monticello not only baffled but irritated people of Jefferson's time, who expected something more conventionally pompous. “This incomprehensible pile,” grumbled one visitor, calling the house “a monument of ingenious extravagance…without unity or uniformity.” Another visitor, granted a rare tour of Jefferson's private suite of rooms by the master himself, pronounced herself “much disappointed in its appearance, and I do not think with its numerous divisions and arches it is as impressive as one large room would have been.” Having heard the murmurings, Jefferson had to acknowledge that his “essay in architecture” was derided as being “among the curiosities of the neighborhood.”
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Then as now, people were charmed by gadgets, and Monticello was full of them. “Everything has a whimsical and droll appearance,” said one guest.
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One enters the parlor through an automatic double door in which both doors open or close when just one is pushed, being linked by an unseen chain under the floor. A visitor to his sanctum sanctorum would have found telescopes, a microscope, thermometers, surveying equipment, and an astronomical clock for predicting eclipses. “His mind designs more than the day can fulfill,” a visitor remarked. Laid up one day with rheumatism, Jefferson passed the hours “calculating the hour lines of a…dial for the latitude of this place.”
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To satisfy an omnivorous mental appetite, he designed an ingenious revolving book holder that accommodated five open volumes at a time. Reclining on a chaise, he composed his voluminous correspondence at a polygraph, a two-pen, two-sheet proto–copying machine that produced a duplicate of a letter as it was written. Even his bed is an item of interest. He placed it in an alcove with open sides—on one side lay his dressing room, on the other his study—but the reason for the open alcove arrangement was not to provide convenient access to one room or the other from the bed but to create a “breezeway” through which the cool night air would flow with increased speed. It is often said that he invented the polygraph, which he did not, and to this day the rumor persists that his bed could be raised on ropes into a hidden compartment in the ceiling—a false story that expresses the abiding belief that Jefferson practiced all manner of disappearing tricks.

Indeed, a great deal went on here out of sight. In designing the mansion, Jefferson followed a precept laid down two centuries earlier by Palladio: “We must contrive a building in such a manner that the finest and most noble parts of it be the most exposed to public view, and the less agreeable disposed in byplaces, and removed from sight as much as possible.”
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The mansion sits atop a long tunnel through which slaves, unseen, hurried back and forth carrying platters of food, fresh tableware, ice, beer, wine, and linens while above them twenty, thirty, or forty guests sat listening to Jefferson's dinner-table conversation. At one end of the tunnel lay the icehouse, at the other the kitchen, a hive of ceaseless activity where the enslaved cooks and their helpers produced one course after another.

During dinner Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert an empty wine bottle, and seconds later pull out a full bottle. We can imagine that he would delay explaining how this magic took place until an astonished guest put the question to him. The panel concealed a narrow dumbwaiter that descended to the basement. When Jefferson put an empty bottle in the compartment, a slave waiting in the basement pulled the dumbwaiter down, removed the empty, inserted a fresh bottle, and sent it up to the master in a matter of seconds. Similarly, platters of hot food magically appeared on a revolving door fitted with shelves, and the used plates disappeared from sight on the same contrivance. Guests could not see or hear any of the activity, nor the links between the visible world and the invisible that magically produced Jefferson's abundance.

Looming above Mulberry Row was a long terrace where Jefferson appeared every day at first light, walking alone with his thoughts. A slave looking up from Mulberry Row would see a very imposing figure outlined against the magnificent architectural features of his mansion. Jefferson was a tall man, over six feet two inches, well muscled, and “straight as a gun barrel,” his overseer Edmund Bacon said; “he had an iron constitution and was very strong.”
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One of his slaves, the blacksmith Isaac Granger, remembered his master as “a tall, strait-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered…a straight-up man, long face, high nose.”
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Jefferson owned a spring-driven strength tester called a dynamometer that he imported from France to gauge the force needed to pull a new plow he was designing. He and his neighbors decided to test their own muscles on this proto-Nautilus machine. His son-in-law Colonel Thomas Mann Randolph could out-pull all contestants, but Jefferson beat him.
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From his terrace Jefferson looked out upon an industrious, well-organized enterprise of black coopers, smiths, nail makers, a brewer, cooks professionally trained in French cuisine, a glazier, painters, millers, and weavers. Black managers, slaves themselves, oversaw other slaves. A team of highly skilled artisans constructed Jefferson's coach. The household staff ran what was essentially a midsized hotel, where some sixteen slaves waited upon the needs of a daily horde of guests.

Below the mansion there stood John Hemmings's
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cabinetmaking shop, called the joinery; a dairy; a stable; a small textile factory; and a vast garden carved from the mountainside—the cluster of industries Jefferson launched to supply his plantation and bring in cash. “To be independent for the comforts of life,” Jefferson said, “we must fabricate them ourselves.” He was speaking of America's need to develop manufacturing, but he had learned that truth on his plantation.
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Jefferson looked down from his terrace onto a community of slaves he knew very well—an extended family and network of related families that had been in his ownership for two, three, or four generations. Though there were several surnames among the slaves on the mountaintop—Fossett, Hern, Colbert, Gillette, Brown, Hughes—they were all Hemingses by blood, descendants of the matriarch Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings, or Hemings relatives by marriage. “A peculiar fact about his house servants was that we were all related to one another,” Peter Fossett said. Jefferson's grandson Jeff Randolph observed, “Mr. Js Mechanics and his entire household of servants…consisted of one family connection and their wives.”
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At dawn the cooks Edith Fossett and Fanny Hern would already be at work preparing breakfast for the household in the kitchen beneath the terrace, right below Jefferson's feet. When he was president and they were teenagers, Jefferson had personally selected them to live in the White House as apprentices to his French chef. Edith was the wife of the blacksmith Joseph Fossett, the son of Mary Hemings.

Mary Hemings's younger sister Sally would be cleaning Jefferson's private suite, removing the chamber pot and the tub of cold water in which the master soaked his feet every morning upon awakening. In the other rooms of the mansion, Jefferson's daughter's family was stirring. He had asked them to move into Monticello when his presidential term ended—Martha had been with her father in Washington and before that in France—so in 1809 Monticello became the residence of Martha and her husband, Colonel Randolph, and their eight children, with three more children to come in the next few years.

Jefferson's grandchildren knew the slaves on the mountaintop very well. They were devoted to John Hemmings and he to them. John and his wife, Priscilla, had no children, but to the presidential grandchildren Priscilla Hemmings was “Mammy” and John Hemmings “Daddy.” The grandchildren felt perfectly at ease descending on “Daddy” Hemmings in his joinery. “All other amusements failing,” one granddaughter remembered, “there was a visit to ‘Daddy' in the carpenter's shops to beg for nails and bits of wood, or to urge on the completion of ‘a box for my drawings,' or a table, or stand, or a flower box. ‘Yes yes! my little mistises, but Grandpapa [Jefferson] comes first! There are new bookshelves to be made, trellises for the roses, besides farm work to be done.' This reply brought a clamor of tongues and ‘You know Daddy you promised!'”
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A relic of one of these visits turned up in an archaeologist's sieve. In Hemmings's joinery the diggers found a three-inch-long, jagged shard of broken slate, inscribed with an enigma, a passage of cursive writing:

 

Beneath…

As ugly B….

Short…

 

The slate had snapped apart, leaving only those words of a text that might have been part of a poem. Jefferson's grandchildren taught some of the slaves to read and write, and this might be a remnant of a lesson in the carpentry shop. Jefferson countenanced his grandchildren teaching the favored slaves (sixteen-year-old Cornelia gave John Hemmings a dictionary!) but did not entirely approve of it.
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“He was in favor of teaching the slaves to learn to read print and no more,” one slave remembered; “to teach them to write would enable them to forge papers [and] they could no longer be kept in subjugation.”
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But writing was more than a tool for would-be escapers. It was the era of the Enlightenment, and “the very idea of writing oneself free was typical of the eighteenth century, when writing seemed to be the visible sign of reason and imagination,” writes one historian.
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Archaeologists have found writing slates and pencils all over the mountain, suggesting that many people tried to make themselves literate there.