Madison and Jefferson (7 page)

The contest with Lord Dunmore obviously tested Virginians’ discomfort with the institution of slavery. When it became clear that the
Somerset
precedent was not going to lead to the emancipation of slaves, Dunmore’s innovative approach to war—arming slaves—raised new and disquieting prospects. Slave owners now suspected that London was going to issue an “act of Grace,” thereby setting all slaves free. The
Virginia Gazette
reacted to the panic by giving a distorted picture of the slaves who sided with Dunmore, putting them in two broad categories: they were either stolen property or wayward men, easily tricked. The writer laughed nervously at the military pretensions of the slave conscripts, supposing that they performed their drills to the absurd tune of “Hungry Niger, parch’d Corn!” The
New-York Gazette
dismissively labeled Dunmore’s recruits as the “scum of the country.” Depicting slaves and indentured servants as hapless pawns, if not mindless creatures, enabled the Virginia militiaman to conclude that he had nothing to fear from them.
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As one can imagine, not all white Virginians believed the stereotype that their slaves were inferior beings. A good many were forced to concede that if given a taste of freedom, slaves were fully capable of pursuing private interests with a will of their own. As slaves began to desert their masters to join up with Dunmore, an unnamed writer in the
Virginia Gazette
promised those who chose to stay with their current masters that slavery would be abolished by the rebellious colony in due course. At the same time, members of the Virginia Committee of Safety executed two liberty-loving slaves who had shown an inclination to serve with Dunmore. Their deaths were meant to serve as an example to others. To judge by the variety of what appeared in the
Virginia Gazette
in 1775–76, there was no universally agreed-upon policy in response to Dunmore’s arming of the slaves.
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One of the most intriguing reactions comes from the private journal of Robert Carter, a prominent forty-eight-year-old planter who lived sixty miles north of Williamsburg. He owned seventy thousand acres and more than five hundred slaves. On July 13, 1776, he gathered his slaves together
and carefully explained the logic behind the Declaration of Independence. He told them that Dunmore had “called upon black People of North America to join him” and enter the king’s service. And then, without apparent guile, he asked whether they disliked their “present condition of life” enough to join Dunmore. They replied that they had no wish to fight against the “white people of the 13 united colonies” and proffered their allegiance to Carter, vowing “to use our whole might & force to execute your commands.” (This is as his diary reads.) Continuing to treat slaves as rational beings, Carter demanded on the spot that they take an oath of allegiance—which free whites would have to do shortly, when General Washington and the Continental Congress required them to pledge their loyalty to the new government. Carter may have been unusual in his approach, but his history reminds us of the complex psychology involved in relationships between masters and slaves. Both had aspirations. Both constantly reckoned with the meaning and extent of power.
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We must be careful not to conflate the eighteenth century with the nineteenth. Once the American Revolution began, the cause of liberty was everywhere shouted, and responsibility for the slave trade was laid at England’s door. In later decades, as more North American land was released from foreign dominion and the British brought slavery in their colonies to an end, a new defense of southern slavery was constructed. Tender masters were turned into philanthropists, somehow the holy victims of a northern conspiracy against them, and slavery became “a necessary evil.” It was different in 1776, when Virginians would have preferred to wish slavery away. A simple logic told them that differences in physical appearance did not dictate that one person should own another. It was a Boston preacher who pronounced in 1774 that “a dark complexion may cover a fair and beautiful mind,” but Virginians too knew that something was terribly wrong.
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Madison, schooled at Princeton where he was one of only a handful of Virginians, identified as easily with his northern peers as with his southern. Yet he evidenced no greater discomfort with slavery than Jefferson did. The “junior” James Madison was a dutiful son whose long-lived father bore chief responsibility for the Montpelier plantation. Madison acquiesced to the slavery system his father administered. His letters home show that he had no interest in questioning the man who sent him funds and provided him every opportunity for personal and intellectual growth.

Jefferson, on the other hand, came into his full patrimony with the death of his mother in the spring of 1776. His father, Peter, had died in 1757, when Thomas was only fourteen. Sometime afterward he spied the
nearby mountaintop and resolved that he would design a classical villa and place it there. He began to level the ground in 1768 or 1769 and moved there permanently in 1770, the same year that he began courting the young widow Martha (Patty) Wayles Skelton. As war approached, Jefferson continued to direct his slaves to bake bricks on the site and build his splendid Monticello. His father had left him at least 7,500 acres and perhaps fifty slaves; in 1773, upon the death of his father-in-law, John Wayles, a ready participant in the transatlantic slave trade, Jefferson inherited 135 more slaves and, with them, crippling debts to English bankers. It was infinitely harder for Jefferson than for Madison to separate his fortunes from land worked by slaves.
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To understand
what
Madison and Jefferson represented, we need to better understand
who
they represented. The circle they moved in contained a good number of privileged and determined men, planters and lawyers steeped in Enlightenment doctrine. We see them today in contradictory roles: self-controlled letter writers with strength of will who, as heavy borrowers, remained prisoners of a slave economy.

As noted, the sprawling Virginia economy centered on the production of tobacco. Because that crop destroyed soil, the lure of western lands—rich and fertile Indian lands—was irresistible. Nearly all the leaders of Revolutionary Virginia were invested in one or more western land companies. Peyton Randolph, first president of the Continental Congress, was among the earliest. George Washington and his neighbor George Mason were principal backers of the Ohio Company, which laid claim to 200,000 acres. Richard Henry Lee lobbied the British ministry for a grant of comparable size to promote his Mississippi Company. Both Jefferson and Patrick Henry lent their names to a petition directed to the Governor’s Council in 1769, requesting 45,000 acres along the Ohio River.

The speculators from the verdant hills and fertile valleys of Virginia’s river-fed Piedmont section deserve our special consideration. Longtime Jefferson family friend and Albemarle neighbor Dr. Thomas Walker was the lead player in the Loyal Land Company over two decades leading to the Revolution. The Loyal Company had an interest in nearly a million acres, primarily in what would become Kentucky. James Madison, Sr., known as Colonel Madison, was a part of this enterprise, and so was Thomas Jefferson’s
father, who traveled almost as widely as Dr. Walker and whose pioneering map of Virginia hangs at Monticello today. When Peter Jefferson died, his shares in the Loyal Company were divided among his eight surviving children, and Walker was named the guardian of his son. In the late 1760s, Edmund Pendleton became an outspoken advocate for the Loyal Company, when he contested the claims of a rival company in Pennsylvania and lobbied the British government for titles to this desirable territory.

Here was a direct link between the fathers of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. In one respect, then, the “glue” that held their interests together was Edmund Pendleton. And until he became their enemy, Lord Dunmore was another eager participant in the Loyal Company investment plan. Powerful Virginians were all somehow connected. So it stands to reason that Pendleton’s eagerness to declare Virginia independent in May 1776, and to instruct its delegates in the Continental Congress to vote for national independence, was related to the landed gentry’s urge for western land. If more evidence is needed of the planters’ expansionist ambitions, note that 1776 Virginia’s claim to the territory of Kentucky was finally recognized.
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These tensions existed because the Proclamation of 1763, issued by the British Parliament, expressly prohibited western migration. London did not wish to be saddled with costly Indian wars merely to support the colonists’ desire to spread out. True, American speculators were frustrated by the Proclamation line, but legal restrictions actually did nothing to dissuade all species of squatters from moving into Indian Territory.

Their appetite for land and their hatred for Indians made war inevitable. In 1774, using Indian attacks as an excuse for a full-scale invasion, Lord Dunmore waged war against the Shawnee people of the Ohio Valley. The defeated Indians ceded their land, and Virginians secured through conquest what had been denied through treaties. It was the last action Dunmore authorized (ignoring London’s opposition) before giving up on cooperation with the colonists.

Not every Virginian turned a blind eye. As James Madison, Jr., read of these events, he expressed the uncommon view that a war against the Indians had been provoked by Dunmore and others out of self-interest. He did not, however, relate his own father’s involvement in western speculation to the seizure of Indian land. Writing to Bradford, Madison conventionally blamed the “unhappy condition of our Frontiers” on the “cruelty of the savages,” before acknowledging that the Indians had been provoked and their “mischiefs … grossly magnified & misrepresented” to rationalize expansion.
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Though by our standards he displayed little empathy toward Indians, Madison did send Bradford what he called a “specimen of Indian Eloquence and mistaken valour.” It was “The Speech of Logan a Shawanese Chief, to Lord Dunmore.” Logan was an Ohio Valley Mingo with extremely friendly ties to white settlers—he had taken a white man’s name in tribute to a Pennsylvania friend. He accused a Maryland militiaman named Michael Cresap of having murdered the women and children in his family. In his speech, Logan admitted to performing acts of bloodshed to avenge his loved ones’ deaths. The speech evoked an image, already familiar to white readers, of the honorable Indian warrior, careless of his own fate, seeking a just retribution and nothing more. “There runs not a drop of my blood in the Veins of any human creature,” the Mingo explained, posing and answering a single question: “Who is there to mourn for Logan? No one.”
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Bradford was so taken by Logan’s sublime speech that he saw to its publication in his father’s newspaper. Jefferson would read the same lamentation in the
Virginia Gazette
and never forgot it. Yet Madison conveyed a mixed message when he offered only faint praise for Logan’s “mistaken valour.”

Madison did not elaborate on the Indian problem to the extent that Jefferson did. Like many of the delegates in Congress, Jefferson believed that the British in Canada would be able to “excite” more tribes to ally with them against the rebellious Americans. His words to John Page reveal a deep anger as well as anxiety: “Nothing will reduce those [Indian] wretches so soon as pushing war into the heart of their country. But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Misisippi.” He could scarcely see any point in trying to sway Indians to abandon their alliance with the British, for they could only be, he said, “a useless, expensive, ungovernable ally.”

This was why the Quebec Act, passed by Parliament in 1774, did more than simply thwart the interests of land speculators. It declared that the border separating Virginia’s claims from Canada was to be drawn at the Ohio River. Since the early seventeenth century, based on their original charter, Virginians had held that there was, in effect, no legal barrier to their land claims to the west—the province extended as far west as their imaginations could encompass and their surveyors could range. And so, seen together, Dunmore’s willingness to turn slaves against their masters and Parliament’s decision to redraw borders led Virginians to see an exponential threat: they were not safe anywhere. The British could easily and
unexpectedly send armed parties of Indians across frontiers, while continuing to appeal to the Virginia-born underclass, white and black. From the perspective of the Virginia gentry, 1776 was the culmination of years of intimidation.
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Jefferson, like Madison, had little use for real Indians. He was pleased, however, to romanticize the North American continent in ways that suited the ambitions of the upwardly mobile Virginians of his generation. Those who inhabited the lands of Virginia, exclusive of Indians, were, for Jefferson, the descendants of hardy English adventurers. They were the heroes of a fantasy frontier, justifying Anglo-American claims to autonomy, to self-determination. In
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
, Jefferson advertised himself as a discoverer of historical meanings.

As a strategic document, the
Summary View
was a forerunner to the Declaration of Independence, a kind of “test” to determine how his patriot colleagues, as well as the king and Parliament, might react to an assertive picture of American power, Virginia-led. Here, as in his Declaration, Jefferson’s argument was dazzlingly drawn, celebrating “the lives, the labors and the fortunes of individual adventurers,” who provided a rationale for the right of conquest. Indians commuted from place to place and used the land in the manner of primitive tribes. Lacking the skill of enterprising white adventurers, they could be supplanted for the sake of productivity and progress.
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Jefferson relied on a straightforward logic. Early British settlers freely migrated to America, exercising their natural right to explore for “new habitations.” Without any help from the British government, “America was conquered, and her settlements made, and firmly established, at the expense of individuals.” Emphatically he added: “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have the right to hold.” He criticized the British government for discouraging westward settlement, and he rejected what he called the “fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king.” America was blood-soaked soil, a conquered land, whose conquerors retained the incontrovertible right of ownership. That right superseded their former ties to Britain.
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