Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (3 page)

For decades archaeologists have been scouring Mulberry Row, finding mundane artifacts that testify to the ways life was lived in the workshops and cabins. They have found saw blades, a large drill bit, an axhead, blacksmith's pincers, a wall bracket made in the joinery for a clock in the mansion, scissors, thimbles, locks and a key, and finished nails forged, cut, and hammered by the nail boys.

A large fragment of animal bone showed the marks of a gouge used for punching out buttons. It had been partly used and then discarded, evoking the image of a particular day in the distant past when someone had her bellyful of making buttons and just threw the damned thing away.

There were marbles, dominoes, and a toy tea bowl left by the children—perhaps by Peter Fossett—as well as part of a Jew's harp and part of a violin neck. One Christmas, Cornelia was walking outside when she was stopped short by music. She turned and saw a “fiddler as he stood with half closed eyes and head thrown back, with one foot keeping time to his own scraping in the midst of a circle of attentive and admiring auditors.”
¹⁸

The archaeologists also found a bundle of raw nailrod—a lost measure of iron handed out to a nail boy one dawn. Why was this bundle found in the dirt, unworked, instead of forged, cut, and hammered the way the boss told them? Once, a missing bundle of rod had started a fight in the nailery that got one boy's skull bashed in and another sold south to terrify the rest of the children—“in terrorem” were Jefferson's words—“as if he were put out of the way by death.”
¹⁹
Perhaps this very bundle was the cause of the fight. But the whole episode, showing the underside of the smoothly functioning plantation machine, is for later in this book.

Weaving slavery into a narrative about Thomas Jefferson usually presents a challenge to authors, but one writer managed to spin this vicious attack and terrible punishment of a nailery boy into a charming plantation tale. In a 1941 biography of Jefferson for “young adults” (ages twelve to sixteen), the author wrote: “In this beehive of industry no discord or revilings found entrance: there were no signs of discontent on the black shining faces as they worked under the direction of their master…. The women sang at their tasks and the children old enough to work made nails leisurely, not too overworked for a prank now and then.” It might seem unfair to mock the misconceptions and sappy prose of “a simpler era,” except that this book,
The Way of an Eagle
, and hundreds like it shaped the attitudes of generations of people about slavery and African-Americans.
Time
magazine chose it as one of the “important books” of 1941 in the children's literature category, and it gained a second life in America's libraries when it was reprinted in 1961 as
Thomas Jefferson: Fighter for Freedom and Human Rights
.
²⁰

In describing what Mulberry Row looked like, William Kelso, the archaeologist who excavated it in the 1980s, writes, “There can be little doubt that a relatively shabby Main Street stood there.”
²¹
Kelso notes that “throughout Jefferson's tenure, it seems safe to conclude that the spartan Mulberry Row buildings…made a jarring impact on the Monticello landscape.”

It seems puzzling that Jefferson placed Mulberry Row, with its slave cabins and work buildings, so close to the mansion, but we are projecting the present onto the past. Today, tourists can walk freely up and down the old slave quarter, and they have computer-generated images and sounds magically transmitted into their smartphones. But in Jefferson's time guests didn't go there, nor could they see the cabins from the mansion or the lawn. Only one visitor left a description of Mulberry Row, and she got a glimpse of it only because she was a close friend of Jefferson's, someone who could be counted upon to look with the right attitude. When she published her account in the Richmond
Enquirer
, she wrote that the cabins would appear “poor and uncomfortable” only to people of “
northern
feelings.”

 

There is a scene from the construction of Monticello that would make an excellent diorama, one of those old-fashioned museum exhibits that make you feel you are actually looking through a window into the past.

Jefferson moved onto Monticello Mountain as a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor in November 1770. During a snowstorm on a bitterly cold day he went to observe the digging of a cellar. Wrapped in a coat, the young master watched a sixteen-year-old girl dig into frozen clay. The crew consisted of four men, two sixteen-year-old girls, and “a lad”—all slaves hired by his contractor.
²²
He wrote a description of the work, taking note of the crew's output for the day, which lasted about eight and a half hours in the frigid weather. Half-frozen, the slaves took frequent breaks to warm up by a fire. An instinctive engineer and calculator, Jefferson measured their output, a hole about 3 feet deep and 132 feet square. He was not commenting on slavery but making engineering and labor notes, setting down for future reference how much digging could be accomplished by youthful laborers on a terrible day.

Our diorama depicting the harsh reality of slave labor—teenage girls and a boy digging frozen clay in a snowstorm to make the cellar of a great mansion—might stir a sense of injustice in our modern breasts and inspire us to wonder what the young Jefferson might have thought about this scene.

Perhaps we think we know the answers: he inherited slavery; it was the accepted system; he believed that black people were inferior; it was impossible to get anything done in Virginia without slaves. Attempting to quiet debate on this vexing, politically charged subject, Dinesh D'Souza echoes this sentiment when he writes, “Jefferson and the founders faced two profound obstacles. The first was that virtually all of them recognized the degraded condition of blacks in America and understood it posed a formidable hurdle to granting blacks the rights of citizenship.”
²³

But if we push an imaginary button on our imaginary diorama, we will hear a voice-over narration in Jefferson's own words. After describing the work in his notebook, he wrote down a verse from Alexander Pope expressing his own condition: “Let day improve on day, and year on year; / Without a pain, a trouble, or a fear.” So it might seem that D'Souza was right, that Jefferson had no moral qualms about what he saw. But the voice-over continues: after copying Pope's optimistic, forward-looking verse, Jefferson wrote an aphorism in Latin—“Fiat justitia, ruet coelum”—“Let there be justice, even if the sky falls.”
²⁴
Years later he would call this his guiding maxim.

Violent contradictions roil the pages—a turmoil of doubts, loathings, self-recrimination, all vying with the imperative to create a productive plantation and the imperative to have peace and justice on the mountain. Jefferson had lately read a savage indictment of slavery by the English poet William Shenstone, a subversive, damning attack by a troublesome foreign intellectual, an attack on the American system that Jefferson did not ignore or rebut but copied into his notebook. He copied out the lines proclaiming that the country of the slave master is “stain'd with blood, and crimson'd o'er with crimes.” He copied the sentiment that the master is “the stern tyrant that embitters life.” In Shenstone's poem, the voice of a slave, torn from his native land, denounces the masters, their cruelty, and their hypocrisy: “Rich by our toils, and by our sorrows gay, / They ply our labours, and enhance our pains.”

The pages of Jefferson's notebook offer a diorama of the young man's psyche—the architect and planter struggling against the moralist, seeking a way to absorb this foul, repugnant system into his interior landscape and into the exterior landscape he is shaping. Jefferson planned a mountaintop cemetery where he would bury both blacks and whites in common ground—“one half to the use of my own family; the other of strangers, servants.” The graveyard would pay everlasting tribute to the slaves: “On the grave of a favorite and faithful servant might be a pyramid erected of the rough rock stone, the pedestal made plain to receive an inscription.”
²⁵
He wrote out an “Inscription for an African Slave” using Shenstone's verse that calls the master a tyrant, making a monument of self-denunciation.

It is highly ironic that Jefferson planned a common burying ground for blacks and whites. Much of the bitterness over the question of Sally Hemings and her relation to him arose from the wish of some slave descendants to be buried in the Jefferson family cemetery on the mountaintop—a request that was rejected by the “documented” Jefferson descendants who own the cemetery. Yet their distinguished ancestor had envisioned everyone resting together for eternity. As it turned out, Monticello ended up with separate cemeteries.

Jefferson's inner debate continues in the pages of his notebook. His copying a passage from Horace, the great Roman poet of the pastoral life, suggests that he is taking moral refuge in the knowledge that he was an heir to classical slavery. “Happy the man who, far from business cares…works his ancestral acres.”
²⁶
Horace's character, a moneylender, retires to the countryside after a strenuous, stressful life. The future that Jefferson envisions for himself at Monticello is like that of Horace's Roman in his villa: “what joy to see the sheep, hurrying homeward…to see the wearied oxen…and the home-bred slaves, troop of a wealthy house.”

Jefferson had grown up among “home-bred slaves.” As a child, he had been conditioned to feel safe among the black household servants, enveloped in a relationship of trust, loyalty, and intimacy. They were his guardians. He preserved a memory, from the age of two, of being lifted into the arms of a slave who held the young master safely through a long journey—“he often declared that his earliest recollection in life was of being…handed up to a servant on horseback, by whom he was carried on a pillow for a long distance.”
²⁷

Archaeology has yielded an insight into the psychology of the slavery Jefferson grew up with. From his mountaintop Jefferson could look down on the site of his old family home, Shadwell, a modest frame house. Marks in the ground show that a fence separated it from four slave cabins housing some thirty people. A handful of trusted slaves lived in a cabin and kitchen building within the pale, but fences and gates kept most of the slaves at a distance.
^*
28
Jefferson wrote down a vivid recollection of someone bullying or beating a slave: “The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” He did not identify “the parent,” but the scene is so vividly described that it was likely Jefferson's own mother or father.
²⁹

As he grew into manhood, Jefferson said that he'd felt virtually alone in believing that the Africans were more than just the equivalent of livestock. He wrote in 1814 to a fellow Virginian:

A Virginia law enacted in 1723 forbade owners to free a slave “upon any pretence whatsoever,” with one exception. A slave who performed some meritorious service could be freed, but the manumission had to be approved by the governor and the governor's council.
³¹
Though slaves were private property, the government interfered with an individual's right to manumit that property because private choice could undermine the institution of slavery. If owners could free slaves at will, there would be no stopping the growth of a class of free blacks. Thus the maintenance of slavery required the imposition, by the government, of rigid class discipline among the slave owners. The Virginia government, entirely controlled by slaveholders, policed their peers to ensure that no emancipationist mavericks rose up among their number.

Jefferson determined to do something about a system that treated people like cattle. After his election in 1769 to Virginia's House of Burgesses, as he writes in his autobiography, “I made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves.” In his 1814 letter he describes what happened:

He blamed a hidebound mentality for the vociferous rejection of his emancipation idea. The lawmakers were deaf to principled argument: “during the regal government, nothing liberal could expect success.”

Jefferson made his emancipation proposal around the same time he took on an intriguing legal case,
Howell v. Netherland
, that illuminates the shifting, increasingly ambiguous racial borderland in colonial Virginia, where strict enforcement of racial laws could have the effect of making white people black.