Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (8 page)

Jefferson made a brief observation in another section of
Notes
that shows his ability to absorb contradiction. In the section on “public revenue and expenses” he states, “The value of our lands and slaves…doubles in about twenty years. This arises from the multiplication of our slaves, from the extension of culture, and increased demand for lands.” So on the one hand, black people are inferior, disloyal, and dangerous, and they grow in number alarmingly; but on the other, they are extremely valuable assets and multiply most profitably. Should we believe the philosophy or the calculation? They worked together. His assets reliably compounding, his philosophy rendering him deaf to the appeals of humanity, he plowed through any contradiction. He wielded a species of power that made its own reality.

The sufferings endured by the American people in the Revolution seized one of Jefferson's early biographers with emotion: “Our fabric, such as it is, is a blood-cemented one. Groans, and tears, and woes unutterable, accompanied every step of its foundation.”
¹
He declared the crucial importance of telling and retelling the stories of the Revolution—“Let every coming generation of Americans understand these facts”—because only then could the nation be forever knit together by shared emotion.

The suffering of the people is written in Jefferson's Farm Book. What makes these woes especially unutterable is that so many of the lives lost were those of children. Next to the names of two girls aged about eight and six Jefferson wrote: “joined enemy & died,” as if they had betrayed him and had been punished.
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Their names were Flora and Quomina. They fled Jefferson's Elk Hill plantation with their mother, Black Sal, and their brother Jemmy, aged ten. They ran because the British promised freedom. Very little is known of Black Sal. She was not a house servant and had no special skill. In Jefferson's records she is a single mother marked down as the lowest kind of worker, a “labourer in the ground.”

The commander of the British forces, Lord Cornwallis, hunting for Jefferson and laying waste everywhere in Virginia, during the month of June 1781 made his headquarters at Elk Hill, a plantation fifty miles from Monticello. In American history the name Cornwallis is synonymous with tyranny and terror, but to the enslaved people of Virginia he was the Liberator. So that summer Black Sal put her family's fate in the hands of the British army. Flora and Quomina died of disease in the British camp. Disheartened, Sal returned with Jemmy to the plantation, where she and her son shortly died.

Though it was known that the British camps were dangerous, two other laborers in the ground, Hannibal and his wife, Patt, gathered up their six children, all under the age of twelve, and ran to the British to get freedom. All of them died of disease.
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3

The Revolutionary War ended with a mass emancipation of slaves, a landmark event that Americans have largely forgotten because it was enacted by the British, and partly because it puts the taint of treason on African-Americans. This liberation culminated in 1783 as a matter of military honor for British field commanders. They rejected the compromises of the diplomats, applied their own interpretation to the peace treaty, and fulfilled their promise to give freedom to everyone who had reached their lines. In the final months of the Revolutionary War some eight to ten thousand black Americans embarked on British ships from New York and ports in the South. The British emancipation of slaves—most of whom were from Virginia—became a political issue. The Virginia Assembly instructed its congressional delegation to demand reparations from the British government.

The story of Black Sal and her children, of Hannibal and Patt and their children, does not quite fit into our “blood-cemented” fabric. When Jefferson's biographer Henry Randall summoned the memory of “woes unutterable” and called for “groans, and tears,” he did not have these people in mind. Their humanity cries out, but they ran to the wrong flag. We can only imagine the desperation and the hope of these parents who took their small children to a military camp on the move. It is a mark of their despair at what they thought the future would otherwise hold; they were fleeing a dead zone where the Declaration of Independence cast no light, and they never made it onto the ships.

When Randall evoked groans and tears, he surely had in mind a passage in Jefferson's papers:

Jefferson was writing about the travail of the slaves, and in his entire canon there is nothing more moving than this passage. From the date when he wrote it, June 1786, until Lincoln's second inaugural address, no American leader so powerfully condemned the American enterprise for violating God's justice. Jefferson possessed a sharp sensitivity to injustice and inequity. Massive social disparity appalled him. He recoiled at the vision of a world without justice, ruled solely by power, in which “every man…must be either the hammer or the anvil,” of society divided in two, with a gilded class resembling “god and his angels in splendor” lording over “crouds of the damned trampled under their feet…suffering under physical and moral oppression.”
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5

Few biographical tasks are more frustrating than trying to assemble a montage of quotations from Jefferson's written work that make sense of his stance on slavery. Among the completely contradictory points he advanced about slaves and slavery, we have: the institution was evil; blacks had natural rights, and slavery abrogated those rights; emancipation was desirable; emancipation was imminent; emancipation was impossible until a way could be found to exile the freed slaves; emancipation was impossible because slaves were incompetent; emancipation was just over the horizon but could not take place until the minds of white people were “ripened” for it.

Laid end to end, his utterances present a rolling paradox of contradictions that inspire his detractors to call him a hypocrite, his defenders to call him compartmentalized, and baffled onlookers to call him “human.” In Joseph Ellis's well-known observation, “He had the kind of duplicity possible only in the pure of heart.” Ellis argues that Jefferson possessed, and in some ways was victimized by, “daunting powers of self-deception,” defends him against the charge of lying, and does not see evidence of a conflicted soul or guilty conscience that others have detected. John Chester Miller finds a “harrowing sense of guilt.” Fawn Brodie writes, “Still, there was guilt,” and suggests that Jefferson urgently examined his conscience, conducting “scrutinies into the heart of man.”
⁶

Jefferson appears out of focus because he was not static; we are seeing a process unfolding. There was the young man, heir to the slave system, who planned a common cemetery for blacks and whites with a monument that condemned his own mastery. There was the fiery revolutionary who denounced the “execrable commerce” of the slave trade, declared that Africans possessed natural rights, and then in 1785 sold thirty-one slaves to keep his creditors at bay. During the post-Revolutionary decade, from 1783 to the early 1790s, Jefferson's misgivings over slavery seem to fade. Blacks still have rights, but the prospect of their emancipation recedes. The “scrutinies” involve not only the heart but also the microeconomics of slavery at Monticello and the macroeconomics of slavery in the emerging nation. The young, unmarried idealist, the disgusted heir of slavery, ages into the father worried over making “provision for my children” and enlarging “that capital which a growing family had a right to expect.”
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He is a man holding a crystal ball in which he simultaneously sees a golden future and a moral abyss, and is thus confronted with a choice.

Jefferson's process mirrored the one taking place in the whole country, so this span of years from the 1780s into the 1790s is crucial. Given the ideals of the Revolution, it was difficult to admit that slavery had a place in the new nation. The racial integration of George Washington's army had raised hopes for a general emancipation of black slaves. Under pressure from extreme progressives—notably the Quakers—the Virginia legislature in 1782 had passed a remarkable law allowing individuals to free slaves, but it stopped short of mandating a general emancipation. Then, as tobacco cultivation faltered in eastern Virginia, it boomed in southern Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. “The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands, and will fill that country with slaves,” George Mason declared during the Constitutional Convention.
⁸

Revered as the chief spokesman of liberty, Jefferson received many appeals from abolitionists foreign and domestic to explain and expunge the contradictions. When the British abolitionist Richard Price, a Unitarian minister, arranged to have a pamphlet on emancipation hand-delivered to South Carolina's Speaker of the House, he was told that the Speaker “thought himself almost affronted by having the pamphlet presented to him.”
⁹
To whom did Price turn for an explanation of this blatant betrayal of American ideals? To Jefferson, of course. Price wrote, “I have made myself ridiculous by Speaking of the American Revolution in the manner I have done; it will appear that the people who have been Struggling so earnestly to save
themselves
from Slavery are very ready to enslave
others
; the friends of liberty and humanity in Europe will be mortify'd, and an event which had raised their hopes will prove only an introduction to a new Scene of aristocratic tyranny and human debasement.”

Jefferson admitted that the new nation presented the “interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression,” but he raised hope for the future. He told Price that “the sacred side” in the conflict over slavery was “gaining daily recruits from the influx into office of young men.”
¹⁰
This was one of a series of responses he composed in the 1780s to defend himself and his country for America's inexplicable delay in ending injustice. To borrow from Joseph Ellis, there is duplicity here and a strange species of purity, because it was vital to Jefferson that he make everything America did seem good.

 

The lives of Flora and Quomina put a human face on the woes suffered by slaves during the Revolution. They also put a human face on aspects of slavery often omitted from discussions of the Founders but very much on Jefferson's mind. The fate of these girls is known because they were assets that Jefferson listed in his Farm Book, along with the names of the rest of Monticello's war dead, as lost property. That crowded corner of the ledger page has a blank feel to it, empty of any remark on the human travail it records. On this page the people are listed not as freedom seekers but as absconded assets, and Jefferson pressured the British government for reparations.

It is still said that slavery was a dying, unprofitable institution after the Revolution, although the historian Robert McColley debunked that myth in the 1970s. The myth remains useful because it averts attention from the fact that slavery was extremely profitable—so profitable in so many ways that, as McColley demonstrated, it was not dying but expanding, well before the cotton boom. Then as now, no one liked to admit that questions of “sacred” human rights are determined by financial considerations.

And without the financial factor, Jefferson's protest against Britain's mass evacuation of freed slaves seems inexplicable, given that the British precisely fulfilled the wish he expressed in
Notes
that African-Americans be colonized to distant places beyond the reach of mixture. If
Notes
is to be believed, the king's generals had done America, and Jefferson himself, a huge favor.
¹¹

But Flora and Quomina, young as they were, owed Jefferson money. In his legal writings he referred to “a debt contracted from the infant to the master.”
¹²
All unknowing, the girls contracted this debt through their mother, as did every enslaved child through every enslaved mother: “being the property of the master, it is impossible she [a slave mother] should maintain it [her child] but with her master's goods.” This formula was universally recognized by slaveholders.
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Slaves came into this world, and into the consciousness of their masters, not only as property but in a debtor relationship, as if they had a contract. Every time a child was born into slavery, a debt was incurred. Their relationship to the master was not just as brute laborers but as shadow players in the economic landscape, quasi-people who could incur obligations, duty-bound to pay for their own upkeep.

This way of thinking put a legal footing under perpetual slavery, as if there existed a contract between Jefferson and his family, on the one hand, and their slaves, on the other. The slaves formed the critical mass of the capital his family had a “right” to expect. Thus redefining his relationship to his slaves, he moved it away from “slavery,” which was loathsome to him because it was a theft of their rights, and toward a framework he felt comfortable with, a framework formed by legalisms of debt and reciprocal obligation, which acknowledged in theory (at least to his satisfaction) the rights of his slaves. Their rights were not abrogated, merely suspended. By being born at Monticello, slaves became part of the legacy that Jefferson's children had a right to expect. In this decade of Jefferson's decision-making, thirty-five girls were born into indebtedness at Monticello.

His dealings with Monticello's slaves express an idea of reciprocity. One of his most important terms is “happiness” (familiar from the Declaration of Independence), both his and the slaves'. He writes, “I have my house to build, my feilds to farm, and to watch for the happiness of those who labor for mine.”
¹³
For his part, he is obligated to act as benefactor of the slaves. He stated to his plantation manager without a trace of irony: “I am governed solely by views to their happiness.” He never explained the existence of this contract to his slaves, but he expected they would perceive its effect and be inspired to reciprocate his benefactions with diligence and loyalty. Those who did not act according to the unspoken contract could be punished.