Read Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Online
Authors: Henry Wiencek
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (28 page)
The distant figure of Jefferson hovers over this world like the god of a Deist universe, the supreme being who set events in motion and then departed, with his offspring “left to the guidance of a blind fatality,” struggling in the world their own father had created.
“The Effect on Them Was Electrical”
At its extreme edge American idealism, with its relentless pursuit of justice, induces a kind of giddiness. A petition that a group of abolitionists submitted to Congress during Jefferson's presidency noted that while “cruelties and horrors” beset Europe, “a beneficent and overruling Providence has been pleased to preserve for our country the blessings of peace, to grant us new proofs of his goodness, and to place us in a condition of prosperity, unrivalled in the records of history.” Surely, they went on, a reciprocal obligation is imposed: a “nation so crowned with the blessings of peace, and plenty, and happiness” must “manifest its gratitudeâ¦by acts of justice and virtue.”
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One such act unfolded in the following manner.
On the first day of April in 1819 a group of seventeen slaves left a plantation in the mountains south of Charlottesville, not far from Monticello, bound for a distant destination. They had been forbidden to carry much baggage and been told they could only take items they would need on a journey. A black man, a fellow slave, was in charge of them. It was not at all unusual for slave drivers to be black men, and this caravan would not have excited much notice at a time when the roads of Virginia were full of “gangs of Negroes, some in irons,” on their various melancholy ways to slave markets. This group of five adults and twelve children had not been told where they were going.
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Riding in wagons, the slaves headed west across the Blue Ridge, then turned north to follow the Great Wagon Road up the Valley of Virginia. Along the way, a white man galloped up to check on the party's progress. He was their master, a wealthy, politically prominent Virginian. Several of the slaves were ill, which delayed the party, so the owner rode ahead. In Maryland the wagons turned west along the National Road (today's Route 40), reaching the Monongahela River after a trek of some 280 miles.
The master had arrived at the Monongahela ahead of his slaves, and there he purchased two flat-bottomed boats, sixty feet long and twelve feet wide, on which the party embarked. Because his slaves were all mountain people who knew nothing of boats, the owner hired a river pilot but had to put him off at Pittsburgh because the man was constantly drunk. At Pittsburgh the Monongahela joins the Ohio River, the great water route to the West and a dividing line between slavery and freedom. On its left bank lay Virginia and then Kentucky, slave states, while on the right stretched the shores of Ohio, which was free.
As the master later remembered, the landscape seemed extraordinarily beautiful that April under a bright sun and cloudless sky, with the pale green foliage of spring emerging on the banks as they floated gently past. Altogether, it was “a sceneâ¦in harmony with the finest feelings of our nature,” as he later wrote in a memoir.
The master deliberately chose this stunning panorama as the backdrop to reveal their destination. He ordered the boats lashed together, assembled the people, and “made them a short address”: “I proclaimed in the shortest & fullest manner possible, that they were no longer Slaves, but freeâfree as I was, & were at liberty to proceed with me, or to go ashore at their pleasure.”
The master later wrote that “the effect on them was electrical.” The people stared at him and then at each other, “as if doubting the accuracy or reality of what they heard.” A profound silence settled upon them. Then, as they slowly grasped the truth of what they had heard, they began to laughâ“a kind of hysterical, giggling laugh”âand then to cry, and then fell again into silence. “After a pause of intense and unutterable emotion, bathed in tears, and with tremulous voices, they gave vent to their gratitude and implored the blessing of God.”
The owner had a further announcement. He said that in recompense for their past services to him, upon their arrival at their destination, the free state of Illinois, he would give each head of a family 160 acres of land. He would settle near them. To the gift of land, “all objected, saying I had done enough for them in giving them their freedom,” insisting they would happily delay their emancipation and remain his slaves until they had comfortably established him in his new home. But the master refused the offer. He said that he had “thought much of my duty & of their rights” and “had made up my mind to restore to them their immediate & unconditional freedom; that I had long been anxious to do it.” Indeed, when the party reached Illinois, “I executed & delivered to them Deeds to the land promised them.”
Along with their freedom and the gift of land, a heavy burden was about to descend on the freed people, the master remarked, and so he availed himself “of the deck scene to give the Negroes some advice.” He expressed
a great anxiety that they should behave themselves and do well, not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of the black race held in bondage; many of whom were thus held, because their masters believed they were incompetent to take care of themselves, & that liberty would be to them a curse rather than a blessing. My anxious wish was that they would so conduct themselves, as to show by their example, that the descendants of Africa were competent to take care of & govern themselves, & enjoy all the blessings of liberty, & all the other birthrights of man; & thus promote the universal emancipation of that unfortunate & outraged race of the human family.
The emancipator was Edward Coles, a thirty-two-year-old member of a very prominent Virginia family. Dolley Madison was his cousin, and among the Virginians whom the Coles family counted as friends and patrons were Patrick Henry, James Monroe, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.
In the massive landscape of slavery, the emancipation of seventeen people may not seem like a significant event. But its symbolism was and is enormous. Coles's emancipation of these slaves was regarded as a cornerstone of the foundation of Illinois. A painting of the event on the river hangs in the capitol rotunda in Springfield, titled
Future Governor Edward Coles Freeing His Slaves While Enroute to Illinois 1819
. In 1822, Coles ran for governor of the state (it was only the second gubernatorial election there) specifically to beat back attempts to make Illinois a slave state, and he narrowly won.
The event is also significant because it was preceded by a debate between Coles and Thomas Jefferson about freeing the enslaved people. Jefferson told Coles
not
to do it, but Coles was determined to give up slave-owning “whatever might be the sacrifices of pecuniary interest, or personal convenience.” The difficulties and sacrifices it required were, he declared, nothing but “dust in the balance when weighing the consolation and happiness of doing what you believe right.”
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In the twilit Jeffersonian moral universe, Coles's act blazes and reminds us what American idealism looks like.
Coles had concluded that slavery had to be eradicated when he was a student at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson's alma mater. One of his professors was the Episcopal bishop James Madison (second cousin of the future president). As Coles wrote in a memoir:
I can never forget [Bishop Madison's] peculiarly embarrassed manner, when lecturing & explaining the rights of man, I asked him, in the simplicity of youth, & under the influence of the new light just shed on meâif this be true how can you hold a slaveâhow can man be made the property of man? He frankly admitted it could not be rightfully done, & that Slavery was a state of things that could not be justified on principle, & could only be tolerated in our Country, byâ¦the difficulty of getting rid of it.
These arguments failed to impress Coles, who had imbibed what Jefferson called “the gas of liberty.” Coles said, “I do not believe that man can have a right of property in his fellow man, but on the contrary, that all mankind are endowed by nature with equal rights.”
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At every opportunity he peppered the bishop with ethical queries worthy of the Stoa of the Athenians, or the dining room of Monticello:
Was it right to do what we believed to be wrong, because our forefathers did it? They may have thought they were doing right, & their conduct may have been consistent with their ideas of propriety. Far different is the character of our conduct, if we believe we do wrong to do what our forefathers did. As to the difficulty of getting rid of our slaves, we could get rid of them with much less difficulty than we did the King of our forefathers. Such inconsistency on our part, & such injustice to our fellow-man, should not be tolerated because it would be inconvenient or difficult to terminate. We should not be deterred by such considerations, & continue to do wrong because wrong had been done in times past; nor ought a man to attempt to excuse himself for doing what he believed wrong, because other men thought it right.
Above all Coles believed in the responsibility of the individual. If you had principles, you had to act by them. Rather than following “the will of the majority,” the individual must obey “what he believed to be the will of God, and felt to be the dictates of right deeply implanted in his nature.”
As he persisted in his debates with the bishop-professor, Coles found that “in theory” the bishop agreed with him, “but I could not convince him he was bound to carry out his theory, & to act up to his principles, by giving freedom to his Slaves.” Bishop Madison looked to the legislature to abolish slavery, as did Jefferson. George Washington expressed the same wish for years, until, weary of waiting for the political climate to change, he decided to defy convention and act on his own to free his slaves.
Coles agreed that he too would prefer a general emancipation sanctioned by the state, but if the people of Virginia
neglected to do their duty, & tolerated a state of things which was in direct violation of their great fundamental doctrines, I could not reconcile it to my conscience & sense of propriety to participate in it; and being unable to screen my self under such a shelter, from the peltings & upbraidings of my own conscience, and the just censure, as I conceived, of earth & heaven, I could not consent to hold as property what I had no right to.
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He kept his intentions secret because he had not yet received title to the slaves allotted to him, and he believed that if his father discovered his intentions, he would not pass title to the slaves.
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But as soon as his father died, Coles told his family of his intention to free his slaves. They argued against the “folly of throwing away property which was necessary to my comforts, and which my parents all their lives had been labouring to acquire.” How would he support himself?
Despite the objections of his family, Coles said his resolution remained “fixed & unalterable”: his “aversion to living in the midst and witnessing the horrors of slavery” compelled him to action. Deeply reluctant to leave his home and family, he considered remaining in Virginia and freeing his slaves on his home ground, retaining them as paid free laborers.
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But his friends were “indignant” at the very idea of it, ominously warning that both he and his freed slaves “would be considered and treated as pests of society, and every effort made to persecute, to injure, and to extirpate us.”
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Edward's brother Isaac had served as President Jefferson's private secretary, and on Isaac's recommendation Jefferson's successor, James Madison, offered Edward that post in 1809. Eager to put his emancipation plan into action immediately, Coles agonized over accepting the president's offer and decided to reject it so that he could the more quickly free his slaves. Riding into Charlottesville to post his letter turning down the offer, Coles encountered James Monroe, who urged him to accept the job, which, he argued, would familiarize him with the leaders of the western states and provide the necessary background information for an emancipation. Monroe told Coles that “it was particularly desirable that I should associate with non-slaveholding people,” whose “habits & customs were so different” from what he had been accustomed to in Virginia, with its “peculiar state of society.” (It is interesting that Monroe believed not only that slave and non-slave societies were very different but that it was Virginia that was “peculiar.”)
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At Monroe's urging, Coles took the post, and he later went to Russia as President Madison's special envoy to Tsar Alexander I.
In Madison's White House, Coles felt the giddy sense of luxury at the crest of American society: “the ease and self indulgence of being waited onâ¦the luxuries of the table &c &c, in which children are usually brought up by the rich planters of the Southern states, had beenâ¦increased and confirmed as a habit in me, by a residence of more than five years in the family of the President of the United States.” First at home, and then at the White House, Coles said, he received a “double schooling” in the “great & protracted indulgence in the highest walks of ease and luxury in this Country.” Later, when he lived without servants, the memory of that ease and luxury “made me feel more sensibly my diminished means of living, & especially the want of being waited on.”
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Travelers remarked on the laziness slavery induced in white people of all classes. In his
American Geography
the New England clergyman and geographer Jedidiah Morse noted the “dissipation of manners [that] is the fruit of indolence and luxury, which are the fruit of the African slavery.”
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Conversing with “the indolent masters” of Virginia, the French journalist Brissot de Warville heard all their reasons for the impossibility of freeing slaves: “they fear that if the Blacks become free, they will cause trouble; on rendering them free, they know not what rank to assign them in society; whether they shall establish them in a separate district, or send them out of the country. These are the objections which you will hear repeated every where against the idea of freeing them.” Brissot de Warville regarded all of this as a tissue of rationalizations, believing that the real obstacle was “the character, the manners and habits of the Virginians. They seem to enjoy the sweat of slaves. They are fond of hunting; they love the display of luxury, and disdain the idea of labour.”
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