Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (9 page)

Jefferson's sense of his slaves' obligation to him was sharpened by what the British did to him when the Revolution ended, when he and his fellow Virginia planters confronted once more the debts they owed to British merchants from before the war. Their grace period was over, and it had not really been a grace period after all. They were shocked to learn that their creditors had added interest during the war. Freed from Great Britain politically, they became enslaved financially. “These debts had become hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London,” he wrote.
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When Jefferson was living in Paris as U.S. minister plenipotentiary in 1784–89, he sought some way out from the debts that he and his countrymen owed.

Jefferson's British creditors were pressing hard for payment of a debt that had been passed to him from the estate of his wife's father, John Wayles. In negotiations with his creditors in 1786, Jefferson raised the issue of Flora, Quomina, and the other dead souls, claiming that the slaves and other property he had lost “would have paid your debt, principal and interest.”
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It is not quite proper to say that Jefferson could “lie,” but here he was twisting the truth. He claimed a loss of thirty slaves, though by his own count he had lost eighteen. (Some returned to Monticello, and later he sold or gave away at least five of those.) He questioned Cornwallis's motives, saying that the general “would have done right” if his intention had been “to give them freedom”—in fact, that
was
Cornwallis's intention. It is worth noting that during the war Governor Jefferson never proposed freeing African-Americans who would agree to bear arms for the United States.

Coldly making the case for what we would call a wrongful-death claim, Jefferson accused Cornwallis of intentionally planning “to consign them to inevitable death from the small pox and putrid fever then raging in his camp.” In any humane calculation the melancholy deaths of the families who fled to freedom can only be called an accident of war, and if anyone had fault, it was Jefferson. But he passed blame to the British for his own failure to inoculate his slaves against smallpox, as Washington had done. Jefferson's pleas left his creditors unmoved.
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Tossing in Paris “on a bed of thorns,” haunted in his sleep by the nightmarish face of the debt collector, he has a liberating revelation: it is the slaves who are responsible for the debt. It is not his fault. The laborers in the ground must compensate him by making greater exertions than ever before—they must work harder, very much harder.
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In July 1787 he writes to his manager at Monticello:

At this point one expects that Jefferson will write “set them free.” But he writes: “put them ultimately on an easier footing,
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which I will do the moment they have paid the debts due from the estate, two thirds of which have been contracted by purchasing them.”
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His slaves in fact had nothing to do with this debt, so it is hard to put a properly descriptive word to this final sentence, which is a turning point in Jefferson's embrace of slavery. One could call it a lie, or an evasion, or a delusion. In any event, it is completely untrue, and Jefferson knew it to be untrue because he was immersed in the legalities of that debt.
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His father-in-law had taken a speculative plunge into the slave market and lost his shirt to a crowd of rich Virginia planters.

Wayles was “one of those wholesale chaps,” as an aristocratic planter described the traders, middlemen, and debt collectors who flocked to the slave trade when the market rose. He and a partner had brokered the sale of a consignment of slaves arriving aboard the
Prince of Wales
in 1772. The shrinkage of inventory en route was 30 percent—only 280 people out of 400 survived the passage, and of these Wayles and his partner sold 266.
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But when Wayles tried to collect payment from his wealthy customers, they were “not at home.” The tobacco market had collapsed; the planters had no ready cash; and in any case they were accustomed to evading bills tendered by the lower sort of chap. So Wayles and his partner were on the hook to their London agents for the total payment for the shipload of people. Jefferson got stuck with the bill when he inherited the Wayles estate in 1773.
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The phrase “blaming the victim” is a modern coinage, but it approximates the frame of mind Jefferson constructed. The slaves Jefferson inherited from Wayles were not the people who had been imported for sale. They were Virginia-born people, but because they were black, he considered that they bore a communal responsibility for the debt Wayles had incurred by trading in black people. Jefferson's letter to his manager shows a deft, magical shifting of blame away from himself, from his father-in-law, from the planters, from the big traders in London—all of whom had bet on the market and lost. Ensnared in obligations by a market so deranged that money had become, Jefferson said, “like oak leaves,” he blames the slaves—
their situation is their own fault, and they are obliged to pay off my debt because I am the victim
.
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His laborers became harnessed to a virtuous undertaking; they would save him; and their obligation for his debts quieted his moral conflicts.

Slavery followed Jefferson abroad. Sent by Congress to France in 1784 as minister plenipotentiary to forge “a powerful link of commercial connexion” between the United States and France, Jefferson carried in his head a vital statistic: more than one-third of all U.S. exports consisted of tobacco. He estimated the total annual value of American exports at $80 million, and of this “thirty [million dollars] are constituted by the single article of tobacco.”
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Not far behind tobacco was rice. Both crops were raised and harvested mainly by slaves.

Without the French fleet, French troops, and French loans, the United States might well have lost the War of Independence. France now held the key to the financial survival of the fledgling republic, locked in a commercial struggle with Great Britain. So Jefferson appealed to the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, stating his hope that “the whole of this [the tobacco crop] be brought into the ports of France” to overcome the “serious obstacle [of] our debt to Great Britain.” With the proceeds of tobacco and rice sales to France, American planters could make payments on their British debts. Furthermore, importing French products for sale in the United States would stimulate the American economy, allowing the British debt to be paid off entirely.
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Jefferson's personal predicament at Monticello mirrored the national predicament. He wrote letters to the foreign minister and to his manager at Monticello in the same week, and the messages were essentially the same; in both the micro- and the macroeconomies, the slaves would be harnessed indefinitely to the task of paying off British debt.
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Jefferson found himself in an extremely awkward position in his dealings with the French government on this issue. The representative of a weak new nation, he could gain access to royal officials only through the intervention of America's friends at court, and all of them were abolitionists. Like his predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson took up a public-relations campaign to persuade our most valued foreign partner that his newly fledged nation did not have a human-rights problem.

The “Americanists” at the French court believed in the ideals of the Revolution and its extraordinary promise for the future of humanity, and they expected Jefferson to do something to end slavery. These were men who had marshaled military and financial backing for the American Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette is the one best remembered today; other supporters were the Marquis de Condorcet, the Marquis de Chastellux (who had visited Monticello in 1782), and the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (who translated the U.S. Constitution into French). Lafayette and Chastellux had crossed the ocean to risk their lives for the American cause, the former as a general in the Continental army, the latter as an officer in the French expeditionary force. Now that independence had been won but slavery remained, they wondered what they had fought for.

These men took America at its word, particularly the words of Jefferson. Gazing across the Atlantic in hope and expectation, Condorcet declared, “The spectacle of the equality that reigns in the United States and which assures its peace and prosperity can be useful in Europe…. What had been for [European liberals] only words and paper had, in America, become flesh and blood.”
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What Americans had accomplished made European hopes soar: “everything tells us that we are bordering the period of one of the greatest revolutions of the human race.”
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The equality was not universal. When the fighting subsided during the Revolutionary War after the Battle of Yorktown, Chastellux had taken the opportunity to visit Jefferson at Monticello. On his way he saw that in Virginia the planters had impoverished free whites working alongside still enslaved blacks. Chastellux wrote that he had never, “since I crossed the sea,” seen white poverty in America to compare with what he found in this slave state:

While Jefferson served in France, a tide of anti-American propaganda poured from England's presses. In order to ruin America's chances of forming commercial alliances with the Continent, the British spread stories that the new American experiment in republican government was sinking into disorder and bankruptcy. “The British ministry,” Jefferson wrote, “have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them.”
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Naturally suspicious of republican government, many French officials were inclined to believe the propaganda. France's small circle of ardent Americanists formed a bulwark against it.

In response to British slanders, both Jefferson and Franklin emphasized America's virtue, enlightenment, liberality, and commitment to equality. Condorcet had declared that equality assures a nation's peace and prosperity. Jefferson wrote that agricultural pursuits made the United States “more virtuous, more free, and more happy.”
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In his campaign to break the traditional, royal-sponsored monopolies that governed the European economy, Jefferson argued a liberal ideology, pressing the notion that free trade emerged from intellectual enlightenment and the advance of “liberal sentiment,” whereas monopolies had their roots in “remote and unenlightened periods.”
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But to keep the support of the Americanists, Jefferson had to confront an ideology of human rights purer than his own. An outspoken opponent of slavery (and a distinguished mathematician and economist), Condorcet wrote that the slave owner “abjured his own rights” and that “to reduce a man to slavery, to buy him, to sell him, to keep him in servitude, all these are real crimes that are worse than stealing.”
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He insisted, in direct contradiction of Jefferson, that “Nature has endowed [blacks] with the same genius, the same judgment, the same virtues as the Whites.” Addressing the slaves directly, Condorcet wrote, “I know how often your fidelity, your probity, your firmness have put your masters to the blush.”
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He advanced a proposal to compel the French government to “examine the means of destroying the slave trade and preparing for the destruction of black slavery.”
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With men such as Condorcet in mind, Jefferson created the impression in
Notes
that a sweeping emancipation law would very soon be passed in Virginia, but that was not the case at all. (Thus he was deeply afraid of having the antislavery statements he tailored for the French circulated in America.) He succeeded in convincing Condorcet of the imminence of change. Condorcet wrote, “It is true that Negro slavery still exists in some of the United States; but all enlightened men feel its shame, and its danger, and this blemish will not long continue to sully the purity of American laws.”
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Jefferson assiduously courted the editor of a major encyclopedia, a publication that was to be widely circulated and would shape opinions about the United States for decades to come, so that he could propose changes in the draft for the entry on the United States. The editor, Jean Nicolas Démeunier, had described Virginia's slave laws and pointed out that the gradual emancipation act whose imminent passage Jefferson had promised in his book had not been enacted. Realizing that this failure put the United States, and Virginia especially, in a very poor light, Jefferson hastened to explain the reason, which he hoped Démeunier would add to the entry: “Persons of virtue and firmness” in the Virginia Assembly had decided that the time was not right; “they saw that the moment of doing it with success was not yet arrived, and that an unsuccessful effort, as too often happens, would only rivet still closer the chains of bondage, and retard the moment of delivery to this oppressed description of men.”
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Jefferson omitted mentioning that the Virginia legislature had liberalized the slave laws so as to enable individual owners to free people at will, for Démeunier would then have asked why persons of virtue and firmness had not yet freed their slaves, particularly why Jefferson had not freed his. Jefferson also did not mention that in revising the slave code, he had suggested a law compelling a white woman who bore a mixed-race child to leave Virginia or be placed “out of the protection of the laws.”
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Painfully aware that French hands were bloody from slavery, Lafayette helped to form the Society of Friends of the Blacks in 1788 with the purpose of abolishing slavery in French colonies and elsewhere. The group included the famous chemist Lavoisier and, of course, Condorcet, who was elected president.
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Among the other founders were some of America's most avid supporters, including the Marquis de Chastellux and the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Jefferson declined to join the society while expressing fulsome support for its goals: “You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery: and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.” But in order to ensure his effectiveness as an antislavery activist in the United States, “prudence” required that he “avoid too public a demonstration of my wishes.”
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During his tenure as America's spokesman in Europe, Benjamin Franklin had trod the same fine line as Jefferson, as the historian David Waldstreicher discovered when he took a fresh look at Franklin's diplomatic career: “He played very carefully with antislavery to gain peace and favorable trading conditions—including access to the Caribbean islands—for the new nation. Whether [Franklin] believed that North American slavery was being eliminated or not…it was extremely useful to say it was.” Waldstreicher continues: “Everything Franklin did in France reflected the need to depict America as virtuous.”
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Though wary of Lafayette, finding him vain and ambitious, Jefferson cultivated his relationship with him, since Lafayette had vital connections at court. Lafayette helped persuade the foreign minister to establish an “American Committee” to examine trade issues. To ensure that American interests would be strenuously represented, Lafayette arranged to get himself appointed a member.
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When he argued the case for importing tobacco from the United States, someone submitted to the committee a persuasive set of agricultural statistics in support of the American position. The author of these complicated statistical tables is not known, but the quality of the work has led scholars to speculate that Condorcet compiled the statistics. Persuaded that slavery would soon be expunged, the abolitionist mathematician quietly used his talent in service to America.
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One of Jefferson's most damning pronouncements about black people—on a par, perhaps, with his speculation that African women copulated with apes—is that it was impossible to free them because they were like children. The key sentence reads: “to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.” Given Jefferson's experience managing slaves, many observers have felt comfortable taking this as the well-considered opinion held not only by Jefferson but by “virtually all” of the Founders.
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But the full context of this remark puts it in a vastly different light. It was not a statement of the impossibility of emancipation but the preamble to a plan for emancipation. So we have reversed Jefferson's meaning, and we have stepped into the Bancroft Paradox.

This famous assessment came out of a dinner party at a country house outside Paris, attended by officials in a position to advance American trading interests. Whatever Jefferson said at this dinner would soon be repeated at court, not only in Paris, but in London as well. Pestered by questions about the injustice of race relations in the United States, Jefferson did what Southerners would do for the next two centuries: he painted a picture for these outsiders of the difficulties and burdens of a white man living among black people.

The dinner took place at the country house of the Chevalier de La Luzerne, who had been France's wartime ambassador to the United States. The king's minister of household affairs, a well-known lawyer named Malesherbes, was also at the table. Jefferson regarded him as a “good and enlightened minister,” an important ally at court to whom he personally sent a copy of
Notes on the State of Virginia
. Also present was Edward Bancroft, an American with connections at the highest levels of British society and officialdom. Bancroft also had ties to important French progressives and to English abolitionists. The signal fact about his career in France at this time was, unfortunately, that he was operating not only as a spy for the Americans but also as an agent for the British, playing them off against each other.