Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (19 page)

At the time when his granddaughter was buying huge amounts of food for Jefferson's table from the slaves—and Jefferson the gourmand always knew precisely where his food was coming from—he wrote another letter claiming that his burden of supporting slaves was “dayly increasing.”
³⁰

The recollections of the former Monticello slave Peter Fossett, from which I drew the opening of this book, contain a confusing passage: “My grandmother was free, and I remember the first suit she gave me. It was of blue nankeen cloth, red morocco hat and red morocco shoes. To complete this unique costume, my father added a silver watch.” Though almost anything is possible in the slavery universe, I could not quite understand how Fossett could have had a grandmother who was free, nor did it seem plausible that a slave boy at Monticello sported a fancy suit and a silver watch given to him by a father who was a slave.

But perhaps Fossett was telling the truth. His parents were two of the most important people on the mountain. His father, Joseph, became Monticello's chief blacksmith when Jefferson had to fire his white blacksmith for chronic drunkenness in 1807. Joseph stepped into the job and expertly ran the forge for the next two decades. The overseer Edmund Bacon described him as “a very fine workman; could do anything…with steel or iron.”
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It was important enough to be the son of the blacksmith, but Peter Fossett's status was further enhanced by his mother's occupation: she was Jefferson's
cook
. Edith Hern Fossett presided over the most modern culinary facility in Virginia, producing meals “in good taste and abundance” for a throng of diners, seven days a week, “in half Virginian, half French style,” as Daniel Webster recalled after a visit to Monticello in 1824.
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Edith Fossett's extraordinary skill did not really become apparent to posterity until 2004, when the Monticello curators completed a reconstruction of the plantation's kitchen, a spacious room underneath Jefferson's private terrace in the south dependency. In Jefferson's time it was a marvel of innovation. Jefferson had ordered it built while he was president so that it would be ready, when he returned to Monticello in 1809, to produce the high-style cuisine he had become accustomed to. Since he anticipated, correctly, an unending torrent of visitors, the kitchen would also have to produce its fine food in abundance. At most plantations the cooking was done in an outbuilding in crude circumstances—dirt floor, an open hearth with a spit, and heavy cast-iron cookware.

Jefferson's new kitchen had a large hearth and a traditional bread-baking oven, but also a “set kettle,” heated by charcoal, which yielded a steady, reliable flow of hot water. Along one wall stood a row of eight charcoal-heated burners called a stew stove. The heat of each burner could be individually regulated by a skilled cook, anticipating the convenience, flexibility, and utility of a modern, high-end multi-burner stove.
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Edith Fossett and her staff worked their culinary magic using some sixty pieces of French copper cookware, of a type seldom seen in the United States at that time—far lighter and much more efficient in conducting heat than cast-iron cookware.
⁴
Skilled and experienced, the cooks maneuvered these skillets, tart pans, fish cookers, and chafing dishes over the burners of the stew stove to produce the French dishes and sauces Jefferson loved. As one of Monticello's experts wrote, “The stew stove allowed cooks to regulate the heat beneath the stew pans, making possible the delicate elements of French dishes like
bouilli
with
sauce hachée
.”
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Monticello's kitchen retained some old-fashioned features, such as a mechanical spit-jack—the eighteenth-century version of the rotisserie—and swiveling cranes to maneuver pots in and out of the fireplace. Oddly enough, the kitchen, redolent every day with smoke and cooking odors, boasted one of the most valuable items in the mansion—an extremely costly, highly accurate “kitchen timer” in the form of a tall-case clock. Jefferson wound it himself every eight days. The presence of this exquisite timepiece reveals the precise coordination and the high level of performance that created meals a visitor called “always choice, and served in the French style.”
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It is not enough to say that Jefferson was a gourmand. As one food historian wrote, Jefferson possessed “an intense interest in food and the critical role it played in how he conducted his private life.” He owned a collection of essays that included “On the Construction of Kitchen Fireplaces and Kitchen Utensils” and “Of the Construction of Saucepans and Stewpans for Fixed Fireplaces.” We have ten surviving recipes that he wrote down himself, as well as his “Observations on Soup,” though he had a poor understanding of how cooking was actually done.
⁷
As far as we know, he never visited the kitchen to offer advice, entering it only to wind the clock.

The kitchen was the domain of Edith, the head chef, and her adjutant, Frances “Fanny” Hern. (They were sisters-in-law: Fanny's husband, David Hern, was Edith's brother.) The records hint at their culinary skills, but I did not realize how extraordinary those skills were until I spoke with Leni Sorensen, the historian who shed so much light on the agricultural records. An accomplished cook herself, Sorensen narrated a typical day in this kitchen.

Every day at least fourteen people were waiting upstairs to be fed—the core of the Jefferson-Randolph household. Often the kitchen fed eighteen to twenty, sometimes as many as twenty-five; one day the kitchen fed fifty-seven people. Sorensen characterized Frances Hern as the “adjutant,” a good military analogy for the highly disciplined nature of this culinary operation. Fossett and Hern would have been well aware of their owner's extreme aversion to conflict or disorder of any kind, so they would have made every effort to ensure that the kitchen operation ran smoothly. When the master emerged for his predawn stroll along his terrace, directly over the kitchen, he would not have heard shouting, cursing, or helpers being hit but the rhythmic rattling of wooden spoons as scullions beat biscuit dough, the differing tones of mechanical music made by the grinding of the day's ingredients—the master's coffee beans, his varieties of sugar (there were several), his salt, and his chocolate. He would have smelled coffee roasting.

With breakfast due on the table at 9:00, Fossett, Hern, and the scullions would have been in the kitchen by 5:30 with three meals on their minds. The cooks would start slicing yesterday's ham and getting today's different breads set up while the assistants heated the bake oven and got the fireplace going with two separate fires—a hardwood fire on the right for roasting and a charcoal bed on the left to feed the eight burners of the stew stove. Once the charcoal was ready, they could get the set kettle started for their hot water.

In addition to ham, breakfast featured three types of raised breads. The dough had to be beaten and set to rise by 7:00 or 7:30 to be out of the oven by 8:45. They brewed coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. Jefferson was particular about his coffee, so the kitchen staff roasted beans every day or every other day. Hot chocolate was also made from scratch; they would grind a block of hard chocolate and then cook it. One of the boys would tend the fires in the hearth, feeding the charcoal stoves under the direction of the cooks to maintain correct temperatures and carrying out ashes, which were saved to make soap.

As the breads and muffins were baking, one or two people would begin dinner preparation, plucking at least half a dozen fowl (chickens, ducks, or geese). By midmorning the dinner prep was fully under way. It was “like making Thanksgiving dinner every day,” Sorensen said, a modern holiday feast being an “average” dinner at Jefferson's house. Every dinner would feature three or four meats and a fish dish, plus four “made dishes” of vegetables with a sauce—potatoes, peeled asparagus (served on toast), parsnips, or an elaborate stuffed cabbage, which was not considered plebeian but a tasty staple of upper-class tables: the cooks would parboil a cabbage, scoop out the center, fill it with minced meat, tie it up in a cloth, poach it, drain it, then cut it into wedges and add a sauce.

Every day they prepared a ham—soaked to get the salt out, boiled, then roasted. Jefferson's
bouilli
was a pot-roast-like dish of beef simmered with vegetables. For the fish there might be shad, or “cod sounds,” a dish made from dried salt cod that Jefferson loved and ordered by the barrel. Every meal featured up to four desserts—ice cream (for which vanilla beans had to be steeped), thin cookies, custards, cakes, and perhaps baked apples in pastry.

Every day Fossett and Hern coordinated the menus and provisions with Burwell Colbert, the butler, and Wormley Hughes, the head gardener, who would keep them up-to-date on what produce his acreage was yielding, what was ripening, and what was slow in coming. Once the cooking began, one of Jefferson's granddaughters might appear from upstairs, take a seat in the kitchen, and begin reading aloud from a cookbook. In a letter Virginia Randolph Trist described herself as “seated upon my throne in the kitchen, with a cookery book in my hand.”
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It was an absurd ritual, but it was the tradition. After years of training and experience, Edith and Fanny had their routines and recipes memorized. The young mistress was actually learning from them, but the illusion of control had to be maintained.

The real function of the granddaughter was to fetch things. Everything of value had to be kept locked up. Jefferson's granddaughters rotated as carriers of the keys, serving for a month at a time, a duty they loathed. After breakfast the granddaughter with the keys would meet with the cooks and be given the list of items needed for dinner—specialty items that might include brandy, raisins, sweet oil, and costly spices such as nutmeg. Jefferson's taste had been refined in the dining rooms of France. When he returned to the Virginia wilderness from Europe, he shipped crates of items he had come to love: “mustard, vinegar, raisins, nectarines, macaroni, almonds, cheese, anchovies, olive oil, and 680 bottles of wine,” as one food historian writes. He continued to replenish his stock of these rare delicacies with regular shipments from Europe.
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Edith Fossett and Fanny Hern held their positions as a result of Jefferson's long-term planning. He had chosen them for their future posts when they were very young; they trained for years in the White House kitchen; and Jefferson expected a lifetime of loyal service. When Jefferson was first elected president, he sought the advice of the French envoy in Philadelphia in finding a Frenchman to cook for him. He hired Etienne Lemaire as maître d'hôtel, the household administrator, and Honoré Julien as
chef de cuisine
. Taking the long view, Jefferson brought three young women from Monticello to learn the intricacies of French cuisine. One lasted only a brief time, but Fossett and Hern excelled at their demanding work.

Demanding it was. Jefferson hosted three dinners a week when Congress was in session so that he would get the chance to dine with all the nearly 150 members, believing that sitting down together at a fine meal inspired “harmony and good confidence.” The daily existence of the congressmen in their Washington boardinghouses was ghastly, in the view of one Englishman; they lived “like bears, brutalized and stupefied.” The Frenchmen and their enslaved pupils, augmented by a hired staff of free blacks and whites, performed heroic culinary labors. “Never before had such dinners been given in the President's House,” said one guest. Jefferson's marathon meals began at 3:30 in the afternoon, and some continued well into the night.
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In Jefferson's estimation, one of the best servants he had at the White House was his butler, a slave named John Freeman whom Jefferson hired from an owner in Maryland. Freeman may have adopted his surname as a ferocious badge of pride: he knew he would be freed in 1815, since he had negotiated an arrangement with his owner gradually to purchase himself, and his White House pay went toward buying his manumission. Perhaps it was Freeman's pride; perhaps it was his skill and the favor it brought him from the president; but Freeman also earned the outright hostility of some of the white servants, who did not like being put on a par with a slave. They especially did not like Freeman wearing the same livery as they. One white servant complained that the president “gave preference to a negro rather than to him,” but Jefferson squelched the man's complaining: “the negro whom he thinks so little of, is a most valuable servant.”
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The records show that at one point Freeman suffered a broken jaw, whether from an accident or an assault we do not know.
¹²

Jefferson brought Freeman to Monticello on his vacations from office. On these visits Freeman grew acquainted with Melinda Colbert, a slave whom Jefferson had given to his daughter Maria and her husband, John Wayles Eppes, at their marriage in 1797. Freeman was at Monticello in April 1804 when he wrote the following note to Jefferson:

Freeman made his appeal at an extremely painful moment. Melinda's mistress, Maria, had just died in childbirth at the age of twenty-five. Well aware of his master's grief, Freeman wrote to him nonetheless because Maria's death might mean that the couple's hopes to marry would be dashed: “I fear the death of her Mistress will make us miserable, unless you will be so good as to keep us both,” and he went on to say that he would give his word “to serve you faithful.” Freeman knew that as a hired slave he would have to return to his owner in Maryland when Jefferson no longer needed his services; so to marry Melinda, he wanted to persuade the president to acquire them both. Jefferson was willing to go halfway: he bought Freeman, even though the contract came with the proviso that he had to manumit him in 1815, but he would not buy Melinda Colbert from his son-in-law Eppes. He already had servants “in idleness” at Monticello, he said, and Freeman knew that marrying a slave woman who lived in Virginia meant, at best, long enforced separations and, at worst, a tenuous marriage.