Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (34 page)

9.
Farm Book
, plates 5–9.

10.
TJ wrote the names of the white workers Fossett, Nelson, Rise, and Walker.

11.
McLaughlin,
Jefferson and Monticello
, p. 101; “Monticello: stone house (slave quarters), recto, September 1770, by Thomas Jefferson,” N38; K16 (electronic edition),
Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive
. The individuals mentioned included Jenny, Suck, Scilla, Dinah, and Ursula.

12.
Kelso,
Archaeology at Monticello
, pp. 64, 96; McLaughlin,
Jefferson and Monticello
, pp. 143–45.

13.
TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., Oct. 19, 1792, in
Papers
, vol. 24.

14.
McLaughlin,
Jefferson and Monticello
, p. 188.

15.
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, Household Accounts, images 24, 27, Library of Congress.

16.
Bear,
Jefferson and Monticello
, p. 3.

17.
Vail,
De la littérature et des hommes de lettres des États Unis d'Amérique
. I am grateful to Jane Foster for her translation of the Vail account.

18.
Langhorne, “Black Music and Tales from Jefferson's Monticello,” p. 60.

19.
Bear,
Jefferson and Monticello
, p. 3.

20.
Ibid., p. 5.

21.
Hemings, “Life Among the Lowly.”

22.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph Memoirs, version 2, no. 1397.

23.
Freedman's Friend
, Dec. 1868.

24.
Kranish,
Flight from Monticello
, p. 266.

25.
Ibid., p. 283.

26.
Randall,
Life of Thomas Jefferson
, vol. 1, pp. 337–39.

27.
Kranish,
Flight from Monticello
, p. 286.

28.
Bear,
Jefferson at Monticello
, p. 8.

3. “We Lived Under a Hidden Law”

1.
TJ to James Madison, May 25, 1810, in
Papers
, Retirement Series, vol. 2.

2.
TJ to D'Anmours, Nov. 30, 1780, in
Papers
, vol. 4.

3.
Wilson, “Evolution of Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia
.”

4.
McColley,
Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia
, p. 115.

5.
Virginia Gazette
, Aug. 20, 1772, p. 1,
http://research.history.org/DigitalLibrary/VirginiaGazette/VGbyYear.cfm
. Also quoted in Boulton, “American Paradox,” p. 470.

6.
Notes on the State of Virginia.
All direct quotations from
Notes
in this chapter are from the searchable UVA etext:
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng//files/14/69/61/f146961/public/JefVirg.html
.

7.
Mill,
Basic Writings
, p. 134.

8.
Wolf,
Race and Liberty in the New Nation
, pp. 1–2, 4–5.

9.
Ibid., pp. 6–7, 17–19; Zuckerman,
Almost Chosen People
, p. 196. As he often did, TJ contrived to have things both ways. Having thrown in his lot with the reactionaries in the 1780s, he retroactively denounced them in 1814 as benighted, self-interested people from whom “nothing was to be hoped.” He said they cared only for property rights and looked upon black people as animals. TJ to Edward Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in
Papers
, Retirement Series, vol. 7.

10.
Quoted in Boulton, “American Paradox,” p. 469.

11.
Boswell and Croker,
Life of Samuel Johnson
, p. 461.

12.
Quoted in Wilson, “Evolution of Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia
,” p. 124.

13.
Jordan,
White over Black
, pp. 287, 519.

14.
Rush,
Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping
, p. 3.

15.
Bruce Dain remarks: “Jefferson had to dismiss a Wheatley. One instance of substantial black reason or imagination would upset his whole scheme.” Dain,
Hideous Monster of the Mind
, p. 34. David Waldstreicher writes: “Wheatley posed a special problem for Thomas Jefferson. He must have been aware that enlightened figures like Voltaire and Rush had already cited Wheatley's poetry in the ongoing, international…debate about race, nature, and slavery…. His vituperative response to Wheatley suggests the threat that her poems and her public actions…posed for Jefferson.” Waldstreicher, “Wheatleyan Moment,” p. 545. David Grimsted dissects TJ's derision of Wheatley in “Anglo-American Racism and Phillis Wheatley's ‘Sable Veil,' ‘Length'ned Chain,' and ‘Knitted Heart,'” pp. 338–444.

16.
Wheatley,
Complete Works
, p. 89.

17.
TJ to Clark, Jan. 1, 1780, in
Papers
, vol. 3.

18.
TJ to Chastellux, June 7, 1785, in
Papers
, vol. 8.

19.
Thomas Jefferson,
Writings of Thomas Jefferson
, ed. Lipscomb and Bergh, vol. 16, p. 452.

20.
Ibid., vol. 10, p. 363.

21.
Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., Notes on the Genealogy of Pocahontas, n.d., Thomas Jefferson Papers Series 6, Randolph Family Manuscripts, 1790–1889, Library of Congress.

22.
Bear,
Jefferson at Monticello
, p. 85.

23.
As McColley notes, Virginians “could command the sympathy of outsiders simply by showing the right attitudes.” McColley,
Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia
, p. 114.

24.
Barker, “Unraveling the Strange History of Jefferson's
Observations sur la Virginie
,” p. 140.

25.
Pybus,
Epic Journeys of Freedom
, p. 105. See also Pybus, “Jefferson's Faulty Math.”

26.
Holton,
Forced Founders
, p. 143.

27.
Kranish,
Flight from Monticello
, pp. 254–55.

28.
Ibid., p. 253.

29.
Ibid., p. 270.

30.
Short to TJ, Feb. 27, 1798, in
Papers
, vol. 30.

31.
Kukla,
Mr. Jefferson's Women
, pp. 69–70.

32.
Armstrong, undated marginal annotation on
Notes on the State of Virginia
, p. 240. I am grateful to John Winthrop Aldrich, who remembered this annotation made by his great-great-great-great-grandfather and provided me with a copy.

33.
Quoted in Edmund S. Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom
, p. 380.

34.
John Kern, “Henry County: Dry Bridge Rosenwald School and Bassett Furniture, Inc.: ‘We Lived Under a Hidden Law,'” lecture, Virginia Forum, 2010.

35.
Peterson,
Jefferson Image in the American Mind
, p. 187.

4. “The Hammer or the Anvil”

1.
Randall,
Life of Thomas Jefferson
, p. 345.

2.
Farm Book
, plate 29.

3.
These departures “had the hallmarks of well-planned, premeditated action,” writes the historian Cassandra Pybus in “Jefferson's Faulty Math,” pp. 245–46.
Farm Book
, plate 29; Stanton,
Free Some Day
, pp. 52–55. Though TJ asserted that Cornwallis “carried off” his people, implying that the British had forced his slaves to abscond, in the Farm Book he wrote that Black Sal and her children “joined the enemy.” He may have made inquiries among the remaining slaves and found that Sal had gone of her own accord. Three men named Robin, Barnaby, and Harry and a boy named Will fled Monticello for the British camp at Elk Hill. Barnaby, a blacksmith, died; after Robin and Will returned to Monticello, TJ sold them; Harry was one of three slaves “never more heard of.” “Jefferson's Statement of Losses to the British at His Cumberland Plantations in 1781” [Jan. 27, 1783], in
Papers
, vol. 6.

4.
TJ to Jean Nicolas Démeunier, June 26, 1786, in
Papers
, vol. 10.

5.
TJ to Charles Bellini, Sept. 30, 1785, in
Papers
, vol. 8.

6.
Ellis also refers to TJ's “highly developed network of interior defenses.” Ellis,
American Sphinx
, pp. 149–50, 177; Miller,
Wolf by the Ears
, p. 163; Brodie,
Thomas Jefferson
, pp. 371–72.

7.
TJ to James Monroe, deleted portion, May 20, 1782, in
Papers
, vol. 6.

8.
Wiencek,
Imperfect God
, p. 268.

9.
Price to TJ, July 2, 1785, in
Papers
, vol. 8.

10.
TJ to Price, Aug. 7, 1785, in
Papers
, vol. 8.

11.
Hochman, “Thomas Jefferson,” p. 180.

12.
Thomas Jefferson, “Argument in the Case of Howell vs. Netherland,” in Ford,
Works of Thomas Jefferson
, vol. 1.

13.
TJ to Angelica Schuyler Church, Nov. 27, 1793, in
Papers
, vol. 27.

14.
Thomas Jefferson, “The Article on the United States in the
Encyclopédie méthodique
; Additional Questions of M. de Meusnier, and Answers,” [ca. Jan.–Feb. 1786], in
Papers
, vol. 10.

15.
TJ to Alexander McCaul, April 19, 1786, in
Papers
, vol. 9.

16.
Pybus,
Epic Journeys of Freedom
, pp. 104–105, 240–41n4.

17.
TJ to Francis Eppes, July 10, 1788, in
Papers
, vol. 13.

18.
TJ to Nicholas Lewis, July 29, 1787, in
Papers
, vol. 11.

19.
TJ discusses the legal intricacies of the Wayles debt in TJ to Eppes, July 10, 1788. Even if the Wayles slaves had somehow been responsible for the debt, the slaves TJ inherited from his parents certainly were not, yet TJ called upon them to labor harder as well.

20.
The other fourteen people might have been the so-called privilege slaves, the commission that Wayles and his partner were entitled to take; or they escaped or died before sale.

21.
When TJ and two other heirs took possession of the Wayles estate, they decided to assume Wayles's debt personally, believing that they could pay it off, rather than leaving it as part of the estate. It was not a bad strategy, but it turned out to be a mistake. Sloan,
Principle and Interest
, pp. 14–26.

22.
Sloan, ibid., p. 24, refers to TJ's generalized sense of victimization by the war, the weather, the market, the merchants in England, and so on. In a 1785 letter TJ blamed British merchants for getting Americans into debt by offering “good prices and credit to the planter, till they got him more immersed in debt than he could pay without selling his lands or slaves.” TJ to Nathaniel Tracy, Aug. 17, 1785, in
Papers
, vol. 8.

5. The Bancroft Paradox

1.
TJ to Montmorin, July 23, 1787, in
Papers
, vol. 11; Nettels,
Emergence of a National Economy
, p. 49.

2.
As the U.S. trade representative in Paris, “Jefferson knew that he represented South Carolina as well as Virginia; his efforts to find new markets for American products, including rice, had increased his awareness of the importance of slave labor in the national economy,” as David Brion Davis writes. Davis,
Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
, p. 178; Waldstreicher,
Runaway America
, p. 231.

3.
Adams,
Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson
, pp. 134–35.