Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (46 page)

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From his parents Jefferson inherited ten families and nine individuals. Five of these families had a father and mother; the other five family groupings listed children under a woman's name only. From John Wayles he inherited eighteen families headed by a man and woman, six by a woman only, and twenty-three unconnected individuals. Some of the one-parent families might have been “abroad” marriages, with the husband owned by another master. He actually began the Farm Book with several pages of horse-breeding notes.

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In another passage he mentioned the “mild treatment our slaves experience, and their wholesome, though coarse, food.”

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Dagger This discussion of the black face may have been inspired by the Shenstone poem Jefferson planned to inscribe on the Monticello grave monument, in which the slave narrator describes the beauty of the white face and its concealment of hypocrisy.

^*
A noteworthy Jeffersonian self-contradiction: elsewhere in
Notes
he expressed doubt that blacks could have a “genius” for anything except brute labor and music, but in this passage he said that almost any endeavor was within the natural talent of the Africans.

^*
The marriage of Mary Hemings and Colonel Thomas Bell is discussed in
Chapter 11

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Disease killed thousands of these runaway slaves, as it killed thousands of British and American soldiers. British doctors inoculated newly arrived slaves against smallpox as fast as possible but could not keep up with the speed of the terrible epidemic sweeping the Eastern Seaboard.

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In his advice to Americans traveling in Europe he wrote: “Take every possible occasion of entering into the hovels of the labourers…see what they eat, how they are cloathed, whether they are obliged to labour too hard; whether the government or their landlord takes from them an unjust proportion of their labour” (“Jefferson's Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe,” June 19, 1788, in
Papers
, vol. 13).

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The emancipation laws of Northern states required slaves to work into adulthood to pay off the master's expense for having maintained them as children. Having died before being able to work off their debt, Flora and Quomina departed this life with their account unbalanced.

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Having failed to lift the debt burden as a private citizen, as secretary of state he argued in 1791 and 1792 that debts to British creditors should be expunged because British generals had violated the peace treaty by evacuating freed slaves.

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Dagger In December 1786 he wrote almost the same words to his manager at Monticello: “I am miserable till I shall owe not a shilling: the moment that shall be the case I shall feel myself at liberty to do something for the comfort of my slaves.”

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The proceeds of tobacco had already paid much of the expense of fighting the Revolutionary War. “To a large degree it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor,” writes Edmund Morgan in
American Slavery, American Freedom
.

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Satisfied with Jefferson's response, Démeunier invited him to rewrite the encyclopedia's entry on the United States, which Jefferson expanded to a length nearly forty pages longer than the article on Great Britain.

^*
Variations of this scenario pop up on Internet discussions today.

^*
In this letter Jefferson absolved the slaves from any guilt for stealing, as he had in
Notes
: “A man's moral sense must be unusually strong, if slavery does not make him a thief. He who is permitted by law to have no property of his own, can with difficulty conceive that property is founded in anything but force.”

^*
Jefferson arrived at Monticello the week before New Year's Day, when hiring contracts began, when slaves who had been rented out would gather their possessions and be marched off.

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Jefferson regarded renting slaves as very risky because he expected they would be abused: “Would it not be well to retain an optional right to sue [renters] for ill usage of the slaves or to discontinue it by arbitration?” Later he limited slave-hiring contracts to one year “so that I may take them away if ill treated” (TJ to Nicholas Lewis, July 11, 1788, in
Papers,
vol. 13; TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., Feb. 18, 1793, in
Papers,
vol. 25).

^*
Polly was a nickname of Mary Jefferson, also known as Maria.

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Burwell Colbert, Jefferson's future butler, was then seventeen.

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In Jefferson's time “police” meant both order and the people who enforced it.

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Years after segregation had fallen, an African-American reflected on how it had become such a successful system of control: “It was like sleep, it just eased up on you. You didn't see it. You're accustomed to it…. Your kids, they don't know anything about it. But they will.”

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Gabriel Lilly was illiterate, and his son's skill with words was apparently rudimentary.

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A historian who studied Edmund Bacon in great detail wondered about the accuracy of Bacon's account, speculating that Bacon himself may have been the one to wield the whip: “One could take this account at face value. But one suspects that for the sake of morale in the nailery, the immediate supervisor, Grady, the man who had to work with the slaves day after day, would not have done the whipping. Bacon may have had the whip in hand while he and Jefferson confronted Hubbard, perhaps accounting for Hubbard's mortifications and distress. Jefferson's words—“we can't punish him”—also suggest that the punishment was to have been immediate. Bacon added that Grady was astonished to see Hubbard ‘come back and go to work after such a crime,' suggesting that Grady was not expecting Hubbard to be at work that day” (Martin, “Mr. Jefferson's Business,” p. liv).

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The bill of sale is reproduced in the 1862 edition, available online, of Pierson's
Jefferson at Monticello: The Private Life of Thomas Jefferson
, pp. 98–99.

^*
I have regularized Freeman's spelling here.

^*
Mary Hemings's father is unknown; she was born before Betty Hemings began having children with John Wayles.

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Some have said that during Jefferson's absence in France, Bell leased Hemings in an arrangement made by Nicholas Lewis, but there is no rental contract in Lewis's records or any record of Bell paying Lewis for Mary's hire, though Lewis's accounts do show payments from other masters for other hired slaves.

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Duke's account of Civil War events had been published in the 1940s by the Albemarle County Historical Society, but Schulman believed that a complete transcription would yield insights into Virginia society beyond the limited scope of “de Wah.” †That Peter could hold on to these precious items without having them stolen and himself beaten by the slave boys or local whites reveals the power of the invisible zone of protection that enfolded him.

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Recognizing the skills of Hemmings and Burwell Colbert, the overseer Edmund Bacon proposed to Jefferson that they repair and paint Bacon's carriage. Bacon would pay not
them
but Jefferson, deducting their fee from Jefferson's debt to him.

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In Jefferson's era “friend” meant “benefactor,” someone habitually rendering aid and conferring advantage; to “befriend” someone denoted one's adopting the role of such a patron. Especially in the master-slave context, the word did not imply the social relationship we associate with it today. Jefferson's granddaughter Ellen used the same word when she wrote, “I am more than ever anxious to have it in my power to befriend, and educate as well as I can, one of these children,” referring to the children of a household slave who had died (quoted in Stanton,
Free Some Day
, p. 124).

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From this fragment it is hard to tell if Jefferson thought Martin was drinking his liquor or stealing it; if the former, then he was the third Hemings brother to have an alcohol problem. James committed suicide after a prolonged binge, and Jefferson gave orders that John Hemmings “must have nothing to do with drink” (TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, Feb. 4, 1800, in
Papers
, vol. 31). In contrast, Jefferson put Peter Hemings in charge of his large brewing operation without evident problems.

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Similarly, the two Hemings siblings who slipped away from Monticello in the 1820s, Harriet and Beverly, had reached their early twenties without taking spouses or having children.

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Jeff Randolph claimed that if his grandfather was having an affair with Hemings, he would have heard incriminating nocturnal sounds from Jefferson's bedroom.

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In the tale of the journalist and the president, one final, ironic, and strangely comforting twist played out decades later: Callender's grandson married Jefferson's grandniece.

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If Bacon got dates and children mixed up and was referring to the late summer of 1807, when Eston was conceived, he has Monticello's architecture against him. Sally Hemings did not have a “room” at Monticello when Eston was conceived. She was then living in a cabin on Mulberry Row. The row of rooms called the south dependency was not completed until 1809, and Hemings moved into her room some time after that.

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Ellen went on to say: “I remember four instances of this, three young men and one girl, who walked away and staid away—their whereabouts was perfectly known but they were left to themselves—for they were white enough to pass for white.”

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Randall mistakenly used the spelling “Henings.” More important, his account is muddled on a major point: Sally Hemings had a
niece
named Betsy and a
sister
named Betty, and it remains unclear which woman Jeff had in mind; possibly Jeff's statement was clear and Randall garbled the conversation in recalling it.

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In this brief remark, Madison hints at divides within the slave community, with some willing to betray others to curry favor with the master.

^*
The newspaper misspelled it; the correct spelling is
enceinte
.

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Similarly, he had used a go-between for another personal transaction, sending his farm manager to tell Mary Hemings he was taking two of her children.

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Dagger Of the 452 free blacks in Albemarle County, none expressed the desire to leave the country of their birth.

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Some of his children and their descendants passed for white and lost contact with their African-American kin. His son Thomas, serving as a white officer in the Union army, was captured and died in the Confederate prison at Andersonville.

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Jefferson's startling assemblage of Christian aphorisms in this letter—“It shall have all my prayers”; “become the missionary of this doctrine truly christian”; “be not weary in well-doing”—is striking because Coles made no religious references in his initial letter but, rather, a thoroughly secular appeal based on justice and human rights. Possibly, Jefferson had heard from James Madison that Coles was religious, and Jefferson thought Coles could be deflected by images of Christian patience.

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Nor was Jefferson too old to take up the arduous, years-long task of establishing the University of Virginia, an accomplishment he put on his tombstone.

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It was sold in 1813 to a merchant who renamed it Morven. In 1988, Morven became the residence of John Kluge, for a time the wealthiest person in the United States. In 2001 he bequeathed the property to the University of Virginia.

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Jefferson asked his friend General John Hartwell Cocke, the owner of Bremo plantation in nearby Fluvanna County, to take over the execution of the will, but Cocke declined.

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The historian Steven Deyle writes: “The United States banned the African slave trade but not slavery itself, opening the door to the development of an even larger American trade in slaves. Virginia slave owners used their extensive political power in the early Republic to promote this new traffic, which quickly answered their needs. The domestic slave trade transformed southern society, making human chattel the most valuable form of property in the South” (Deyle, “‘Abominable' New Trade”).

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How remote was that day? In 1832 the Virginia legislature considered a statewide emancipation plan that would come to fruition in 1910.