Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (11 page)

The machine age had arrived, promising a transformation of agriculture, and Jefferson took a keen interest in the latest innovations. In August 1791, while serving as George Washington's secretary of state, he visited a farm outside Philadelphia to inspect a newly invented threshing machine (the president went with him for a look).
¹⁶
Later in that decade he ordered models of several different designs, which he then modified himself, eventually putting three machines into operation at Monticello. Outside contractors built the machines, but he depended on slaves to operate and repair them, and that was the keystone of the new plantation system.

Wheat farming forced changes in the relationship between planter and slave. Tobacco was raised by gangs of slaves all doing the same repetitive, backbreaking tasks under the direct, strict supervision of overseers. Wheat required a variety of skilled laborers, and Jefferson's ambitious plans required a retrained workforce. When his slaves greeted him on his return, he saw not a mob of “simple minds” but a promising flock of potential millers, mechanics, carpenters, smiths, spinners, coopers, and plowmen and plow-women.

Jefferson still needed a cohort of “labourers in the ground” to carry out the hardest tasks, so the Monticello slave community became more segmented and hierarchical. They were all slaves, but some slaves would be better than others. The majority remained laborers; above them were enslaved artisans (both male and female); above them were enslaved managers; above them was the household staff. The higher you stood in the hierarchy, the better clothes and food you got; you also lived literally on a higher plane, closer to the mountaintop. A small minority of slaves received pay, profit sharing, or what Jefferson called “gratuities,” while the lowest workers received only the barest rations and clothing. Difference bred resentment, especially toward the elite household staff.

Planting wheat required fewer workers than tobacco, leaving a pool of field laborers available for specialized training. Jefferson embarked on a comprehensive program to modernize slavery, diversify it, and industrialize it. Monticello would have a nail factory, a textile factory, a short-lived tinsmithing operation, coopering, and charcoal-burning. He had ambitious plans for the mill and a canal to provide water-power for it.

Training for this new organization began in childhood. Jefferson sketched out a plan in his Farm Book:

Measuring and counting everything, Jefferson devised numerous expedients for saving money and labor and for maximizing productivity. He determined, for example, that he could feed the slaves on dried fish for half the cost of pork: “a barrel of fish, costing 7.D. goes as far with the laborers as 200. lb of pork 14.D.” He laid out housing to save labor: “Build the Negro houses near together that the fewer nurses may serve & that the children may be more easily attended to by the super-annuated women.”
¹⁸
He put old people and the partially infirm to work, referring to the crew of gardeners as his “senile corps.” He exulted that his successful textile factory “only employs a few women, children and invalids who could do little in the farm.” He had a very broad definition of “invalids”: on the one hand, he specified that they should “work only when they are able,” but on the other hand he thought that “they will probably be equal to the hauling away the earth and forming it into a bank on the side next the river.”
¹⁹

Tobacco required child labor (their small stature made children ideal workers for the distasteful task of plucking and killing tobacco worms); wheat did not, so Jefferson transferred his surplus of young workers to his nail factory (boys) and spinning and weaving operations (girls). He launched the nailery in 1794 and supervised it personally for three years. “I now employ a dozen little boys from 10. to 16. years of age, overlooking all the details of their business myself.”
²⁰
He said he spent half the day counting and measuring nails. In the morning he weighed and distributed nailrod to each nailer; at the end of the day he weighed the finished product and noted how much rod had been wasted.

The nailery “particularly suited me,” he wrote, “because it would employ a parcel of boys who would otherwise be idle.”
²¹
Equally important, it served as a training and testing ground. All the nail boys got extra food; those who did well received a new suit of clothes, and they could also expect to graduate, as it were, to training as artisans rather than going “in the ground” as common field slaves. Some nail boys rose in the plantation hierarchy to become house servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, or coopers. Wormley Hughes, a slave who became head gardener, started in the nailery, as did Burwell Colbert, who rose to become the mansion's butler and Jefferson's personal attendant.
²²
Isaac Granger was the most productive nailer, with a profit averaging eighty cents a day over the first six months of 1796, when he was twenty; he fashioned half a ton of nails during those six months. The work was tedious in the extreme. Confined for long hours in the hot, smoky workshop, the boys hammered out five to ten thousand nails a day, producing a gross income of $2,000 in 1796. Jefferson's competition for the nailery was the state penitentiary.
²³

The nailers received twice the food ration of a field worker but no wages. Jefferson paid white boys (an overseer's sons) fifty cents a day for cutting wood to feed the nailery's fires, but this was a weekend job done “on Saturdays, when they were not in school.” Jefferson's grandchildren sometimes pitched in, as the overseer wrote, and worked with them “like little Turks on Saturdays, so that my boys could go with them a-fishing.”
²⁴

Exuberant over the success of the nailery, Jefferson wrote: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.”
²⁵
The profit was substantial. Just months after the factory began operation, he wrote that “a nailery which I have established with my own negro boys now provides completely for the maintenance of my family.”
²⁶
Two months of labor by the nail boys paid the entire annual grocery bill for the white family. He wrote to a Richmond merchant, “My groceries come to between 4. and 500 Dollars a year, taken and paid for quarterly. The best resource of quarterly paiment in my power is Nails, of which I make enough
every fortnight
to pay a quarter's bill [emphasis added].”
²⁷
The success of the nail factory spurred him to develop other enterprises staffed by skilled slaves that brought in cash or made Monticello more self-sufficient.

He wrote out a plan for a harvest involving a small army of sixty-six laborers. His enslaved manager and blacksmith, Great George Granger, would ride behind the harvesters “with tools & a grindstone mounted in the single mule cart…constantly employed in mending cradles & grinding scythes. The same cart would carry about the liquor…. cradlers should work constantly.” Five of the “smallest boys” would be the gatherers, supervised by a “foreman,” who was one of the larger boys. Women and “abler boys” would bind the sheaves. There would be stackers, loaders, cooks, and carters; “the whole machine would move in exact equilibrio, no part of the force could be lessened without retarding the whole, nor increased without a waste of force.” He estimated that this force, fueled by four gallons of whiskey, would complete a harvest in six days.
²⁸

A foreign visitor in 1796, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, observed this human machine in operation and was deeply impressed. “I found him in the midst of the harvest from which the scorching heat of the sun does not prevent his attendance,” wrote the duke, who noted Jefferson's all-encompassing attentiveness to plantation management: “He orders, directs and pursues, in the minutest detail, every branch of business.”
²⁹

Sharing Jefferson's passion for innovative, scientific agriculture, the duke inspected the plantation with a practiced eye, noting with approval the treatment of the workers—“His negroes are nourished, clothed, and treated as well as white servants could be”—and observing with some astonishment that the blacks had mastered a multiplicity of skills: as “cabinet-makers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc.” He could not restrain his excitement.

The exhilaration in the duke's account arises from his perception that a breakthrough had been achieved in a remarkably short time. He could see no trace of the racial inferiority Jefferson had described in
Notes
. The enslaved, who Jefferson had said in France were as simple and useless as children, were skilled, diligent workers motivated “by rewards and distinctions.” So the question inevitably arose: Is
this
the moment to set the people free?

Apparently not. The duke dutifully reports to his European readers Jefferson's good intentions: “The generous and enlightened Mr. Jefferson cannot but demonstrate a desire to see these Negroes emancipated.”
³⁰
But then there is the thud of disappointment. In a tone of some bafflement La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt tries to explain why the demonstrable skills and good character of the enslaved are not sufficient, in Jefferson's view, to gain them freedom: “He sees so many difficulties in their emancipation [and] he adds so many conditions to render it practicable, that it is thus reduced to the impossible.” Jefferson is determined to police the color line: “the Negroes of Virginia can only be emancipated all at once, and by exporting to a distance the whole black race. He bases his opinion on the certain danger, if there were nothing else, of seeing blood mixed without means of preventing it.”

At this point an air of unreality settles over the scene, for the race-mixing Jefferson claims to dread has already taken place. La Rochefoucauld could see for himself that Jefferson had staffed his household with mixed-race slaves “who have neither in their color nor features a single trace of their [African] origin.”
³¹

The people of Monticello had more than fulfilled the conditions Jefferson had set down in a letter written in 1791 to the black mathematician-astronomer Benjamin Banneker:

The roster of skills acquired by the Monticello slaves is remarkable. Historians have compiled a list of their occupations: plowmen and plow-women, gardeners, shepherds, millers, charcoal burners, sawyers, carpenters, joiners, cabinetmakers, wheelwrights, carriage makers, coopers, basket makers, blacksmiths, nail makers, tinsmiths, spinners, weavers, dyers, seamstresses and tailors, shoemakers, brickmakers and bricklayers, stonecutters and stonemasons, glaziers, plasterers, painters, roofers, launderers, cooks, dairy workers, brewers, soap makers, candlemakers, butlers, barbers and hairdressers, maids and valets, midwives, coachmen, hostlers, wagoners, and watermen.

 

The conversation of the duke and the Founder on that blazing June day at Monticello is an archetypal scene in Southern life—the visit to a plantation by an outsider who gazes and listens in increasing bafflement as the evidence of his eyes is contradicted by what he is told. Here Jefferson takes on the part of a universal figure—the master called upon to explain a central mystery of American life. With the diligence and skill of the slaves fully evident, Jefferson explains that
despite what you see, these people are degraded and different and they have no place in our country
. He establishes that slavery is mysterious, that on this borderland of races the master alone comprehends the processes taking place: dangerous primal struggles despite the apparent tranquillity.

Arguing with such a man was futile. Tossing up
so
many difficulties,
so
many conditions, the master trumps the outsider with his esoteric knowledge of the race mystery. But like the duke, we must take a close, interrogating look at the systems Jefferson put into operation on his mountain. Indeed, there were processes invisible to the duke.

The people gathering the sheaves and sharpening the scythes in the hot sun of a Virginia afternoon were soon to be owned in Amsterdam. Jefferson was conducting negotiations with a Dutch merchant-banking house to finance the recapitalization of Monticello's operations and the construction of its new mansion. The people La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt watched at work were about to become bundled and collateralized assets in an international banking transaction.

The deal was finalized in the solemn legal language of “Witnesseth” in a financial instrument between Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle in Virginia on the one part and Nicholas Van Staphorst, Jacob Van Staphorst, and Hubbard of Amsterdam in the United Netherlands, merchants and partner: