Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (12 page)

In his approach to the Dutch bankers, with whom he had had dealings in Europe, Jefferson reported that his estate was “much deteriorated” after his absences but that “an advance of from one to two thousand dollars would produce a state of productiveness.”
³⁴
Determined to fight off his debts, Jefferson bought time by selling people, and then he realized he could take on debt
to expand
, to acquire new machinery and erect a new house. He showed the plans to La Rochefoucauld, who thought “his house will certainly deserve to be ranked with the most pleasant mansions in France and England.”
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The Dutch bankers opened an equity line backed by Jefferson's slaves for $2,000.
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It was around this time that Jefferson chided a neighbor who had suffered financial losses, saying he “should have been invested in negroes,” and urged the neighbor's family to invest “every farthing” of their available cash “in land and negroes, which…bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.” The slaves had condemned themselves: the more skilled they became, the more valuable they became, and the more they tightened the chains of their enslavement.
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With the machine functioning in equilibrium, the owner would never dismantle it. Jefferson had also calculated that it was vastly cheaper to feed, house, and clothe a slave than hire a free white worker, if he could find one.
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Yet when questioned by an outsider about freeing slaves, a master never said
they are too valuable
; it was much easier to say
they are like children
.

The duke was present at a transitional moment in American history. Like many other planters in the South, Jefferson was trying to devise a “rational and humane” plan not to end slavery but to reshape it and bring it into the new republic as an acceptable, indeed respectable component of the economy and society. This is what slaveholders called “amelioration.” Traveling through the Chesapeake country at about this time, the Irishman Isaac Weld noted that slaveholders “have nearly everything they can want on their own estates. Amongst their slaves are found tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, turners, wheelwrights, weavers, tanners, etc.”
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Mainly a business plan, amelioration included a psychological component—persuading slaves that it was rational and humane for them to be enslaved. This is what Jefferson, Washington, and the other revolutionaries had most feared that the British would do to the white people of America: persuade them or trick them into submitting to a form of slavery that had invisible chains.
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The psychological underpinning of amelioration might be found, perversely, in the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson's sources for it. Jefferson wrote of a fearful apparition,
the sufferable evil
, a concept he derived from John Locke's observation that people “are more disposed to suffer than right themselves by resistance.” Jefferson re-wrote this in the Declaration as, “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The ameliorated version of slavery looks very much like the sufferable evil Jefferson warned of, clothed in “prevarications and artifices” masking a design to reduce the people “under absolute Despotism.”
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The slaveholders were fashioning a transition from the system of slavery they had inherited, which Jefferson portrayed as a burdensome legacy bequeathed by the dead hand of the past, to a new, refined system of deliberate enslavement. With Virginia's liberal manumission law of 1782 still on the books, owners could free their people at will, but that law was quietly gathering dust, a vestige of Revolutionary fervor now burning out. Very few planters relinquished their slaves, as Jefferson had predicted in
Notes
: “Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power they possess.”

 

Another outsider rose up. As if from the grave of the Revolution, a stalwart veteran of the cause, the Polish general Thaddeus Kosciuszko, called upon Jefferson for help in composing a last will and testament. The memory of what he had fought for was on his mind. Leaving America for Europe in 1798 to take up the cause of Polish independence, Kosciuszko wished to ensure that the long-delayed payment he had just received for his Revolutionary service in the American uniform would be put to a revolutionary use. Kosciuszko's command of English was not perfect, so he asked Jefferson, in whom he had complete faith, to sit down with him to compose a will that would stand up in an American court. In preparation, Kosciuszko drafted the following document in his own hand, in imperfect English. It reads like a farewell address to America and Jefferson:

Kosciuszko had one request to make of the people he expected to free: “in gratitude to me to make themselves hapy as possible.”

 

The word to which every writer on slavery must eventually resort is “irony.” When Jefferson had gone to inspect the new threshing machine near Philadelphia, George Washington went with him. One irony is that Washington was turning in his mind plans for freeing his slaves, which he would eventually do in his will after his family had thwarted his earlier effort. On the issue of slavery, Jefferson emerges poorly in a side-by-side moral comparison with Washington, but in hindsight we can see which Founder more truly reflects the times and the character of the country. The public would little note, and did not long remember, Washington's emancipation of his slaves. In hindsight, George Washington's “inflexible” sense of justice and insistence on “a common bond of principle” seem antique, as dull and disapproving as his portrait on the dollar, when set beside the ingenuity, vision, and entrepreneurial energy on full display at Monticello. The future belonged to Jefferson.

When the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt toured Monticello in 1796, he was shown the industrious, apparently tranquil surface of a smoothly functioning system. But the duke saw right through it.
What happened to your ideals? When will you free the people?
Patiently, Jefferson explained to the duke that yes, the enterprise is patently unjust, but it is temporary. Soon we shall find a way to exile these people, and the moral problem will be solved. In the meantime, the system works well, and no one seems to object. No slaves complain to the duke. The moral universe of the Revolution has been upended, yet everyone seems satisfied, so perhaps he is wrong to impose his values on this strange society.

And so La Rochefoucauld wrote an account of the “generous and enlightened” plantation master, which has echoed through the histories and biographies. His description of harvest time at Monticello is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Jefferson had been able to fashion a humane version of slavery. But what the duke saw was a carefully constructed illusion.

Rarely did plantation insiders break ranks and tell the truth about slavery, unless something deeply shocking jolted them into an awareness they had suppressed. After decades of managing Monticello for his father-in-law, managing his own farm at Edgehill, and observing slavery's operation at its most enlightened and progressive, Colonel Randolph wrote a wrenching private letter saying that the whole “Southern system” was “a hideous monster” ruled by brutality and fear. The event that jolted Tom Randolph into writing this letter was the discovery of a man's body dangling from a tree at a neighbor's plantation near Monticello.
¹

He knew the man. The attributes Randolph ascribed to him in the letter, a eulogy to a slave, were bravery, intrepidity, trustworthiness, resoluteness, and “despising pain and not knowing fear”—attributes not usually ascribed to African-Americans by people of Randolph's class. The man had committed suicide after being whipped. Unable to bear the humiliation, he had lynched himself.

No one is to blame. “In this particular case both Master and overseer are humane men, and the latter of proven fortitude, as well as moral worth.” The enterprise is cruel, but no one stops it. The system is amoral and seems to run by itself, and it functions, perversely, under a veneer of humanity and moral worth. The blame is nowhere, but it is everywhere; people live as if in a miasma. In his haunted mood Randolph writes of a “sooty atmosphere,” an extraordinary, Melvillean metaphor of filthy, choking air that stinks of corruption. It is the air of hell, and Randolph was breathing it in Virginia. But one gets used to it, especially when you are utterly dependent on making the machine work, as Randolph was.

When Jefferson told the duke that he animated slaves with rewards, he was fabricating an illusion for his visitor and perhaps for himself. In the first place, he was speaking of a very small number of people. Only a very small minority of the slaves received a share of profits and what Jefferson called “gratuities.” The rest were animated by fear of the overseers. And La Rochefoucauld was not shown everything on his tour of inspection. The system had a less tranquil operation just across the Rivanna River at the farm where Jefferson's overseer William Page was acquiring a reputation as a “terror” with free use of the whip to maintain productivity.

The favored slaves, whom the duke did see, labored so industriously because they were desperate to remain in the master's favor, to stay on the mountaintop and not be sent below, where the overseers were in charge. Amelioration did not trickle down. Writing about a girl who was not performing well in the textile mill, Jefferson said, “I have given her notice that she shall have some days trial more, and if there be no improvement, she must cease to spoil more cloth and go out to work with the overseer.”
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Perhaps the master's greatest power was his control over family life. It was Jefferson's general policy to keep families together, partly because he did have feelings of humanity, though he sometimes referred to the marriages among slaves as “connections,” which he thought were rather easily broken. Keeping families intact was also in his interest: “Certainly there is nothing I desire so much as that all the young people in the estate should intermarry with one another and stay at home. They are worth a great deal more in that case than when they have husbands and wives abroad” (meaning on another plantation and owned by someone else).
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Housing, food, clothing, work assignments, family unity—all benefits flowed from the master. But to receive these benefits, one must stand in the master's favor, encouraging a permanent posture of dependence and gratitude.

When the duke inspected the Mulberry Row nail factory, he saw twenty-year-old Isaac Granger pounding hard at a forge, setting an example of efficiency for the younger nail boys. Granger belonged to one of Monticello's leading families. His father and brother, both managers, were crucial gears in the Monticello machine, men who stood in Jefferson's favor. Isaac left a memoir in which he calls Jefferson “a mighty good master,” an assessment that has echoed through the Jefferson biographies.
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But the blacksmith left many things out.

For some thirty years Jefferson depended on the Grangers to help him run Monticello. The Grangers owed Jefferson a very deep debt. As mentioned earlier, they were separated after John Wayles's death and would never have seen each other again had Jefferson not reunited them at Monticello through two costly purchases. When Jefferson was in France and ordered his manager, Nicholas Lewis, to hire out slaves—which put the slaves at great risk of mistreatment—he specifically exempted the Grangers along with the Hemingses: “Great George, Ursula, Betty Hemings not to be hired at all.”
^*
5
And when Jefferson rented a farm to the cruel overseer William Page, he first moved Great George's son Bagwell and his family away from the place.

Jefferson sized up the Grangers as accomplished, loyal, hardworking people. Great George could read and write. They possessed skills in high demand that would have allowed them to support themselves in Virginia or elsewhere. As individuals and as a family, they were perfect candidates for the citizenship Jefferson spoke of in his pledge to train slaves for freedom. But they were also perfect candidates for high-ranking positions in the Monticello establishment.

When Jefferson returned from France, he spent less than a year at Monticello, having been summoned to serve as secretary of state by President Washington. Before he left, he placed direct management of the mountaintop farm in the hands of Great George, under the loose supervision of Colonel Randolph, who would be residing at Monticello in Jefferson's absence. Before he left for Philadelphia in the fall of 1790, Jefferson walked around Monticello with Granger and gave him instructions about what he wanted built for the Randolphs. As he put it in a memo for Colonel Randolph: “A wash house…to be built and placed where I pointed out to George…. A stable to be built…where I have pointed out to George.”
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He expressed the highest confidence in Granger: “George…will be sufficient to see that the work is done, and to take all details off of your hands.”
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Jefferson appointed Great George the foreman of laborers at Monticello, sought his advice on crops and livestock, and paid him £20 a year, which was much less than the wages of white overseers. He paid £35 a year and five hundred pounds of pork to William Page.
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As farm manager, Granger had good years and bad. One season he brought in a harvest that Jefferson judged “extraordinary.” Jefferson made the Grangers, the father and later a son, buffers between himself and the workforce that labored at the forges and “in the ground.” Jefferson told Colonel Randolph to exempt Granger from the lowest tasks: “I consider George as their foreman, and should not require him to lay his hand to the hardest work.”
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As early as 1774, Jefferson had recognized the qualities of the oldest Granger son, also named George, and made him an apprentice to a hired white blacksmith. After two years “Smith” George, as he became known, took over the forge, saving Jefferson the expense of the hired white man. Smith George ran the Monticello blacksmith shop for more than fifteen years.
¹⁰
Jefferson also put him in charge of the nailery. When Jefferson was away, Colonel Randolph reported, “I scarcely look to the Nailery at all—George I am sure could not stoop to my authority & I hope and believe he pushes your interests as well as I could.”
¹¹

The Grangers were the beneficiaries and victims of Jefferson's long-term planning. Too important to release, four generations of Grangers served Jefferson in skilled positions. Multigenerational service of one family to another was not unusual in the plantation world and imparted the feeling that the institution of slavery had some relationship to eternity.

The manuscript of Isaac Granger's memoir, along with a daguerreotype portrait of him, came to light only in the 1940s. The twenty-four-page, handwritten document had been set down by a white historian, Charles Campbell, who had sought out the blacksmith in the 1840s and spoke with him at some length about his experiences. Then in his seventies, Isaac was a free man living in Petersburg, Virginia. The daguerreotype shows a robust, well-muscled man wearing a white work shirt and a leather apron—apparently, the blacksmith was still working. Campbell described him as “rather tall, of strong frame, stoops a little, in color ebony; sensible, intelligent, pleasant.”
¹²
It is not entirely clear how the blacksmith got to Petersburg as a free or semi-free man.

The blacksmith's memoir conveys snippets of conversation with Jefferson and verbal snapshots of Jefferson and daily life on the mountain. Isaac got to know his master rather well, it seems, and Jefferson, who had an instinctive affinity with artisans, seemed to take a liking to him. With Isaac as his helper, Jefferson tinkered at various projects in a small metalworking shop. As a young boy, Isaac had learned to be an adept forgeman, a maker of fire. He told of crawling into a “great big bake oven” in Williamsburg, where he worked as a boy of six or seven years old: “Isaac would go into the oven and make fire…. Isaac used to go way into the oven.”
¹³
(Throughout the account Isaac refers to himself in the third person.) The baker who hired him commended his skills to Jefferson: “This is the boy that made fire for me.”
¹⁴

As a workingman, Isaac made a point of giving credit to other laborers, both white and black, even if no one might be interested in hearing it. He did it instinctively: “Mr. Jefferson came down to Williamsburg in a phaeton made by Davy Watson. Billy Ore did the ironwork.”
¹⁵
With Isaac's help Jefferson fabricated small metal items he needed around the house: “My Old Master was neat a hand as ever you see to make keys and locks and small chains, iron and brass. He kept all kind of blacksmith and carpenter tools in a great case.”
¹⁶

Isaac's father could read and write, so young Isaac had a sense of the power of literacy, took note of Jefferson's machine for copying his writings, and was impressed by the “abundance of books” heaped and strewn on the floor of the study—“sometimes would have twenty of 'em down on the floor at once.” He recalled that whenever someone asked Jefferson a question, “he go right straight to the book and tell you all about it.”
¹⁷
One wonders if Isaac himself put any questions to the master. The vividness of Isaac's recollections suggests that he spent a surprising amount of time in Jefferson's presence. He noticed when Jefferson began to wear glasses and recalled when Jefferson had a swelling in his legs which made walking so difficult that he and John Hemmings would have to roll the master around the farm on a wheelbarrow. He noted that Jefferson sang when he went about his fields and that his master “bowed to everybody he meet; talked with his arms folded.” Interestingly, this was a posture of authority. The polite way to present oneself to equals was with arms hanging loosely at one's side with the forearms very slightly raised. Formal eighteenth-century men's clothing was tailored to hold the arms in this position. Isaac was describing a gentleman's manner of presenting himself to people he regarded as his inferiors.
¹⁸

Isaac went along as a servant on Jefferson's hunts for partridge and hare, noting with approval that his master would never shoot game that was sitting, “would give 'em a chance for thar life.” Isaac gazed in wonder at the dramatic beauty of the landscape surrounding the mountaintop, leaving a word portrait of Monticello that is remarkably like Jefferson's well-known comment on seeing weather fabricated at his feet: “From Monticello you can see mountains all around as far as the eye can reach; sometimes see it rainin' down this course and the sun shining over the tops of the clouds.”
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He remembered the portraits Jefferson had in the parlor, including “pictures of Ginral Washington and Marcus Lafayette.” Granger had actually met Lafayette—“saw him fust in the old war in the mountain with Old Master.” Later, when Isaac was living in Petersburg, he went to see Lafayette on his triumphal visit to Richmond in 1824. He walked right up to the hero “and talked with him and made him sensible [reminded him] when he fust saw him in the old war.”
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Granger vividly recalled Monticello as a place of music, that Jefferson “kept three fiddles” and that he “fiddled in the parlor” in the afternoon and evening. He heard one of the daughters playing the spinet and tried to chat up the Frenchmen who came to tune the fortepiano: “Isaac never could git acquainted with them; could hardly larn their names.” He recalled his master constantly singing as he rode or walked around the plantation—“hardly see him anywhar outdoors but what he was a-singin'. Had a fine clear voice.”
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As night fell, a different voice could be heard—that of Isaac's mother, Ursula, singing the Randolph children to sleep.