Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (31 page)

 

Jefferson saw slavery as congruent with his Enlightenment conception of the world and a quasi-religious vision that he articulated from time to time. Pious Christians denounced him as an atheist, but Jefferson did have a deistic belief in the workings of God; he could see the hand of the deity, for example, in the evident prosperity of the United States. In his first inaugural address he spoke of “acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence which
by its dispensations
proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter [emphasis added].” Near the conclusion of the address he returned to that theme: “May that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe, lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.”

On his home ground in Virginia and at Monticello, Jefferson saw divine agency in the “increase” of black children, his human assets: “a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man. in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly.” He ordered his manager to take special care in the treatment of the “breeding” women.
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There is little or no distance between this “providential” calculation and “the branch of profit” Jeff Randolph reviled—“to rear slaves for market”—but Jefferson had thoroughly rationalized what he was doing.

The business of slavery was conducted in such a “sooty atmosphere” that morality vanished in the smoke. Near the end of 1815, Jefferson sold a three-year-old girl from Monticello named Sally, the daughter of Aggy, to his overseer at Poplar Forest, Jeremiah Goodman, for $150.
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Jefferson and Goodman agreed that Sally would remain with her mother at Monticello. It seemed strange that an overseer would spend $150 to own a girl who lived ninety miles away, but in later records Sally turns up with the surname Goodman, so the overseer was buying his own daughter. A year and a half later Goodman changed his mind: he wanted to sell Sally back to Jefferson for $180, so the two men decided that the sale was “annulled.” One day Sally had a father; the next day she did not. In such a world, such things happen and no one is responsible. The founding has many fathers, but slavery is an orphan.

 

The long list of people who begged Jefferson to do something about slavery includes resounding names—Lafayette, Kosciuszko, Thomas Paine—along with the less-known Edward Coles, William Short, and the Colored Battalion of New Orleans. They all came to Jefferson speaking the Revolution's language of universal human rights, believing that the ideals of the Revolution actually meant something.

Deeply reluctant to judge a Founder as wanting in moral force, modern commentators retreat to a range of adjectives such as “flawed,” “human,” “contradictory,” “paradoxical,” “compartmentalized,” while preserving for Jefferson what the historian Alan Taylor calls “a fundamental core of naive innocence.”
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But at Jefferson's core there lay a fundamental belief in the righteousness of his power. Jefferson wore racism like a suit of armor, knowing that it would always break the sharpest swords of the idealists.

Lafayette had a powerful insight, detecting in slaveholders a combination of “prejudices, Habits, and Calculations.”
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This combination acted as their engine, in place of a conscience. Racism ratified their power, as did the dispensations of Providence. They were precursors of the Ayn Rand protagonist of the twentieth century. One of Rand's admirers wrote gratefully to her that she had “the courage to tell the masses…you are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” Rand herself composed a sentence that could have come from the pen of a Southern planter: “The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”
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Jefferson fashioned a system at Monticello that worked supremely well; he lacked for nothing in the many long years he lived there before, during, and after his presidency. And yet the consensus among historians has been that he was weighted down and eventually dragged under by slavery. Ellis expressed this consensus when he wrote:

Such assessments come from a close study of what Jefferson said, but not from the evidence of his ledgers. “I am not fit to be a farmer with the kind of labour we have,” he once famously complained. But then we find him reporting in 1800 that “my nailery…still flourishes greatly, employing 16. boys at a clear profit of about 4. to 500£ annually.” Feeling pinched, he “executed a mortgage to you on 80. slaves, which at a sale would fetch 4000£.” He settled one debt in installments, “the last of which will be paid off by this year's crop”—a crop that was of course planted, cultivated, and harvested by his black slaves. Would white men have done better, produced more? Actually, no: he found white tenant farmers, when he could locate any, to be lazy and pigheaded, leaving the fields “in a slovenly and disgusting state; and to get the tenants to aim at something better is extremely difficult…. it is easy enough to get tenants if you will let them destroy the land.”
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We simply cannot believe Jefferson's complaints about his slaves, which fit into his pattern of shifting blame to others for his own mistakes and weaknesses. During his presidency Jefferson averred that the slave's “burden on his master [is] daily increasing,” yet as the economic historian Steven Hochman has found, “during his presidency Jefferson's nailery and his farms provided an income that should have met reasonable expectations. The debit side of Jefferson's balance sheet was where he had his problems.”

In 1801, the first year of his presidency, Jefferson overspent his salary by some $8,600, earning $25,000 and spending $33,636.84. He laid out $3,100 for a new carriage and horses, wishing to have “first-rate” steeds, and, Hochman adds, “a particularly large item was $2,797.38 for wines.”
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Debt never prevented Jefferson from doing anything he wanted to do. He built Monticello and then rebuilt it on a grander scale; then he built his Poplar Forest mansion; then he spent some $30,000 on a mill and canal near Monticello. The historian Herbert E. Sloan writes, “Had he not poured some $30,000 into his flour mill and local navigation improvements, he might have withstood some of the pressures that crushed him.”
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The consensus must be turned around: with Jefferson miring himself in debt, his slaves kept him afloat.

The blow that finally destroyed Jefferson's finances came not from the supposedly burdensome slaves, whose labors were financing his lifestyle and the modernization of his plantation, but from his in-law Wilson Cary Nicholas, the former senator. In 1818, when Nicholas was heavily invested in land speculations, he asked Jefferson to co-sign a $20,000 note—and then promptly went bankrupt. Even so, Jefferson managed to stagger along at Monticello.

 

At its extreme edge idealism becomes rude, and so it was when the Marquis de Lafayette visited Monticello in 1824, on his final, highly emotional, triumphal tour of the nation he helped to create, and he pressed Jefferson about his failure to do anything to end slavery. Before modern commentators deride any criticism of Jefferson as rank “presentism,” they should consider the appeal that came from the lips of Lafayette, a hero very much of that time.

When Lafayette arrived at Monticello, he fell into Jefferson's arms. An enormous throng, gathered on the lawn of the mansion, settled into a profound silence as the two heroes embraced and wept. In the following weeks the old friends took daily carriage rides around the mountain, driven by a slave, Israel Gillette Jefferson, who left a memoir: “I well recollect a conversation he had with the great and good Lafayette, when he visited this country…as it was of personal interest to me and mine.”
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He continued:

At Jefferson's death, his slaves paid the price for the master's first-rate acquisitions and his relative's speculations in western lands. The families of Jefferson's most devoted servants were split apart. Onto the auction block went Caroline Hughes, the nine-year-old daughter of Jefferson's gardener Wormley Hughes. Also sold away from her family was Isabella Fossett, age eight. One family was divided up among eight different buyers, another family among seven buyers.
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Joseph Fossett, the Monticello blacksmith, was among the handful of slaves freed in Jefferson's will, but Jefferson left Fossett's family enslaved. In the six months between Jefferson's death and the auction of his property, Fossett tried to strike bargains with white families in Charlottesville to purchase his wife and six of his seven children. His oldest child (born, ironically, in the White House itself) had already been given to Jefferson's grandson. Fossett found sympathetic buyers for his wife, his son Peter, and two other children, but he watched the auction of three young daughters to different buyers. One of them, seventeen-year-old Patsy, immediately escaped from her new master, a University of Virginia official.

Joseph Fossett spent ten years at his anvil and forge earning the money to buy back his wife and children. By the late 1830s he had the cash in hand to reclaim Peter, then about twenty-one, but the owner reneged on the deal. Compelled to leave Peter in slavery and having lost three of their daughters, Joseph and Edith Fossett departed Charlottesville for Ohio around 1840.

Jefferson said that free blacks and whites could not live “under the same government,” but even during his lifetime they were doing so right in Albemarle County. Just north of Charlottesville a family of free blacks owned more than two hundred acres in the settlement that expanded and came to be known as Free State. One free black who lived there, Zachariah Bowles, occasionally worked at Monticello. He married one of Jefferson's most important household servants, Critta Hemings. After Jefferson's death his grandson Francis Eppes purchased Mrs. Bowles and immediately set her free so that she could live with her husband. Their landholdings were substantial, amounting to nearly one hundred acres.

 

For decades historians have been trying without success to discover what happened to Jefferson's two missing children, Harriet and Beverly Hemings, who left Monticello in 1822 with their father's consent. Harriet and Beverly apparently never told their families about their lineage. The safest thing to do was to disappear and abolish your genealogy. When the DNA findings of a link between Jefferson and Hemings made headlines around the world in 1998, no descendants of theirs emerged to claim kinship.

The last known sighting of Beverly Hemings occurred in Petersburg, Virginia, about twenty miles south of Richmond, in the early 1830s. After successfully creating a new identity, Beverly returned incognito to the land of slavery and boldly made a very public appearance—giving a demonstration of the new scientific sensation, ballooning.
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The antebellum equivalent of a space shuttle launch, balloon ascents drew enormous, awestruck crowds, so this aeronaut ran the risk of being recognized. But he must have had enough confidence in his new identity, and more confidence in the fact that he looked white, to reenter Virginia like a spy venturing into an occupied country. Beverly's metamorphosis from plantation slave to aviation pioneer is truly extraordinary. We know of his balloon ascent from an allusion to it in the memoir of the Monticello blacksmith Isaac Granger, who witnessed the event; it may have been the one advertised in the July 3, 1834, Petersburg
American Constellation
—“A 4th of July Balloon Ascension” by “a splendid balloon, 30 feet high, and 58 feet in circumference.”

Beverly's new life as a balloonist brings to mind a seemingly trivial detail in the Monticello records: he had worked there as a cooper, a maker of barrels. Barrels were a valuable commodity, and Jefferson had his slaves produce them for sale off the plantation. Coopering was also a key skill in ballooning. Balloonists had to fabricate an intricate but sturdy system of wooden barrels, which they filled with water and a carefully measured amount of sulfuric acid. The ensuing reaction within the casks, which had to be very tightly made, produced hydrogen gas. Leather pipes directed the hydrogen into the balloon. Thus the successful ascent of a balloon depended on the quality of the chemistry and the coopering.
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