Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (40 page)

5.
Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” pp. 47–48.

6.
Coles, “Emancipation,” Oct. 1827, p. 1. I am very grateful to Bruce Carveth for generously providing copies of his Coles material. Coles knew he could ease his conscience simply by asking his father for some other property, but he reasoned that the effect would be merely to perpetuate the enslavement of his allotted inheritance “as if I had sold the portion of them which I should otherwise have inherited.”

7.
He considered and abandoned the idea of keeping the freed people in Virginia, evading the removal law “by not having the free papers recorded,” and formalizing the emancipation in his will so that the freed people would be protected in case of his sudden death.

8.
Coles, “Emancipation,” pp. 2–3.

9.
Coles, “Autobiography,” n.p.

10.
Ibid.

11.
Morse,
American Geography
, pp. 390–91.

12.
Brissot de Warville, quoted in Poole and Buchanan,
Anti-Slavery Opinions Before the Year 1800
,
www.gutenberg.org/files/23956/23956-h/23956-h.htm
.

13.
Ress,
Governor Edward Coles
, pp. 42–43; Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” p. 52.

14.
Coles to TJ, July 31, 1814, in
Papers
, Retirement Series, vol. 7.

15.
TJ to Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in
Papers
, Retirement Series, vol. 7.

16.
Coles to TJ, Sept. 26, 1814, in
Papers
, Retirement Series, vol. 7.

17.
Billy Wayson, lecture, Jefferson Library, International Center for Jefferson Studies, May 2011.

18.
Short to TJ, Feb. 27, 1798, in
Papers
, vol. 30.

19.
Kosciuszko wrote three more wills in Europe after leaving the United States. These dealt mainly with his property in Europe, though he did decide in 1806 to leave $3,700 from the U.S. funds to his American godson, Kosciuszko Armstrong (son of John Armstrong Jr., U.S. minister to France). He corresponded with TJ in 1817 and reiterated that his intention to free slaves with his American funds remained “fixed.” Kosciuszko believed that his European wills would in no way affect his American will, but TJ's refusal to execute Kosciuszko's will left it in limbo, an attractive prize for litigants. Armstrong and other claimants tried and failed to invalidate the emancipation will in a U.S. suit in 1823, giving TJ a second chance, but he did nothing. Two decades later another suit succeeded, and the U.S. will was declared invalid by the Supreme Court. Had TJ acted as his friend had wished, several enslaved families would have been liberated and become landowners in a free state. Mizwa, “Kosciuszko's ‘Fortune' in America and What Became of It,” pp. 1–3.

20.
Turner, “Did Jefferson Sleep with Sally Hemings?”

21.
Life and Ancestry of Warner Mifflin
, pp. 84, 79, 85.

22.
Freehling,
Reintegration of American History
, p. 188.

23.
Richard Newman, “Good Communications Corrects Bad Manners,” in Hammond and Mason,
Contesting Slavery
, p. 77.

24.
Fogel,
Slavery Debates
, p. 39.

25.
TJ to Benjamin Banneker, Aug. 30, 1791, in
Papers
, vol. 22.

26.
Foster,
Jeffersonian America
, pp. 148–49.

27.
TJ to Edmund Bacon, memorandum Fall 1806, in
Farm Book
, p. 25.

28.
TJ to Grégoire, Feb. 25, 1809, in Peterson,
Thomas Jefferson: Writings
, p. 1202; TJ to Joel Barlow, Oct. 8, 1809, in
Papers
, Retirement Series, vol. 1.

29.
TJ to Burwell, Jan. 28, 1805, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,”
www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation
.

30.
Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 347.

31.
TJ to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,”
www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation
.

32.
TJ to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820, in
Farm Book
, p. 26.

33.
TJ to Joel Yancey, Jan. 17, 1819, in
Farm Book
, p. 43.

34.
TJ to Lydia Sigourney, July 18, 1824, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,”
www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation
.

35.
Elizabeth Trist to Catharine Wistar Bache, Dec. 28, 1810, Family Letters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.,
http://retirementseries.dataformat.com
.

36.
Scanlon and Gallatin, “A Sudden Conceit,” p. 152.

17. “Utopia in Full Reality”

1.
Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ellen W. Randolph Coolidge, Aug. 2, 1825, Family Letters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.,
http://retirementseries.dataformat.com
.

2.
Berlin,
Generations of Captivity
, p. 161.

3.
Thomas J. Randolph,
Speech of Thomas J. Randolph
, p. 17.

4.
Baldwin,
Cross of Redemption
, p. 152.

5.
Notes on the State of Virginia
.

6.
TJ to James Monroe, Nov. 24, 1801, in
Papers
, vol. 35.

7.
Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina's Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” pp. 272–73.

8.
McColley,
Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia
, p. 125.

9.
Hammond,
Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion
, p. 48.

10.
Adam Rothman,
Slave Country
, pp. 24–26.

11.
Ibid., pp. 31–32; Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 345.

12.
Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 347.

13.
Paine to TJ, Jan. 25, 1805; TJ to Paine, June 5, 1805, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

14.
Taylor,
From Timbuktu to Katrina
, p. 75.

15.
Hammond,
Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion
, p. 47.

16.
Appleby,
Thomas Jefferson
, p. 136.

17.
Hammond,
Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion
, pp. 44–45.

18.
Ibid., pp. 30, 39–47.

19.
Brown,
Constitutional History
, p. 215.

20.
Berlin,
Many Thousands Gone
, p. 9.

21.
William W. Freehling, “The Louisiana Purchase and the Coming of the Civil War,” in Levinson and Sparrow,
Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion
, pp. 72–73.

22.
William Cabell Rives to James Madison, April 18, 1833,
http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-02-02-02-2721
.

23.
TJ to Joel Yancey, Jan. 17, 1819, in
Farm Book
, p. 43.

24.
TJ to Jeremiah Goodman, Nov. 30, 1815, July 20, 1817, in
Farm Book
, pp. 40–41.

25.
Taylor, “American Abyss,” p. 390.

26.
Quoted in Burstein,
Jefferson's Secrets
, p. 142.

27.
Ludwig von Mises, letter to Ayn Rand, Jan. 23, 1958,
http://hessenflow.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/ludwig-von-mises-letter-to-ayn-rand/
; Ayn Rand,
Atlas Shrugged
, p. 975.

28.
Interview with Joseph Ellis.
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/interviews/ellis.html
.

29.
TJ to William Short, April 13, 1800, in
Papers
, vol. 31.

30.
Hochman, “Thomas Jefferson,” pp. 223–25. The historian Billy Wayson remarked to me that TJ was “a genius at finance.” He tapped numerous supplies of credit, including the banks he professed to loathe, and skillfully juggled and refinanced his loans.

31.
Ibid., p. 238; Sloan,
Principle and Interest
, p. 11.

32.
Israel Jefferson quoted in Brodie,
Thomas Jefferson
, p. 481.

33.
Stanton,
Free Some Day
, pp. 144–45.

34.
Isaac Granger said: “Sally had a son named Madison, who learned to be a great fiddler. He has been in Petersburg twice: was here when the balloon went up—the balloon that Beverly sent off.” Bear,
Jefferson at Monticello
, p. 4.

35.
Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette
, January 8, 1835.

18. Jefferson Anew

1.
In the 1790s he purchased the side of the adjacent mountain, Montalto, that could be seen from Monticello, cleared its trees, planted meadows, and set sheep to grazing there to create a pastoral vista.

2.
Bon-Harper, “Contrasting Worlds,” pp. 4–5.

3.
Peterson,
Jefferson Image in the American Mind
, p. 49.

4.
TJ to Robert Pleasants, Aug. 27, 1796, in
Papers
, vol. 29.

5.
Boulton, “American Paradox,” p. 473.

6.
Ticknor,
Life, Letters, and Journals
, p. 35.

7.
Miller,
Wolf by the Ears
, pp. 156, 176.

8.
Peter S. Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy,” in Boles and Hall,
Seeing Jefferson Anew
, p. 14.

9.
Kevin Butterfield, Review of Boles, John B.; Hall, Randal L., eds.,
Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours
. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. April 2011.
www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31509
.

10.
Walter Johnson, “Inconsistency, Contradiction, and Complete Confusion: The Everyday Life of the Law of Slavery,”
Law & Social Inquiry
22, no. 2 (Spring 1997), p. 413.

11.
Foster,
Jeffersonian America
, p. 149. Also quoted in Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness,” in Onuf,
Jeffersonian Legacies
, p. 163.

12.
Onuf, “Scholars' Jefferson,” p. 675.

13.
Ellis,
American Sphinx
, p. 104.

14.
David Brooks, “The Great Seduction,”
New York Times
, June 10, 2008.

15.
“Jefferson Lottery,”
Monticello.org
.

16.
Peterson,
Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation
, pp. 23, 538, 149, 535, 534.

17.
Johnson, “On Agency”; Morris, “Articulation of Two Worlds.”

18.
Gordon-Reed,
Hemingses of Monticello
, p. 405.

19.
Phillips,
American Negro Slavery
, pp. 184–85.

20.
Waldstreicher,
Runaway America
, p. 232.

21.
TJ to David Bailey Warden, Dec. 26, 1820, in Ford,
Works of Thomas Jefferson
, vol. 12.

22.
TJ to Charles Pinckney, Sept. 30, 1820, in Ford,
Works of Thomas Jefferson
, vol.  12; TJ to Thomas Cooper, Sept. 10, 1814, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,”
www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation
.