Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (32 page)

Not having seen his family for some ten years or more, Beverly must have sent advance word of the balloon ascent to his brother Madison Hemings, who turned up from Charlottesville. Madison was legally a free man, but he was living in the land of slavery and was yoked by the restrictions fastened on free people of color. Beverly was legally still a slave because Jefferson had never freed him, but ironically Madison saw him in his post-Monticello life as an aeronaut, doing something that not only attained the height of adventure but symbolized human liberation. A contemporary poem paid envious tribute to one early balloonist, an Icarus who never fell:

 

He's gone off to glory, where he's free from all sorrow,

If he's not there to-night, he'll be there to-morrow,

And Heaven I'm sure has forgiven his sin,

For I saw the sky open, and saw him pop in.
³⁶

 

Beverly disappeared so thoroughly from the historical record that he might as well have popped into the sky. He had achieved in fact what the balloon poet could only imagine—a vanishing.

Thomas Jefferson quite consciously shaped his legacy. Like many other of our Founding Fathers, he organized and stored his voluminous correspondence to preserve his point of view for the future. But with equal deliberation and care he made alterations to Monticello during his presidency, knowing that when he retired, influential visitors would ascend his mountain and describe to others what they'd seen. He redesigned the entrance hall as a museum displaying objects that supported the portrait of him as an American
philosophe
with wide-ranging intellectual interests and many notable accomplishments. With displays of dazzling, exotic artifacts brought back from the West by Lewis and Clark, he drew attention to the Louisiana Purchase, by which he had not only doubled the size of the United States but made real the dream of establishing a continent-wide empire of liberty.

Slavery could ruin the image. As mentioned earlier, Jefferson's initial design of the mansion “removed from sight as much as possible” all functions that would appear “less agreeable.” His redesign of the Monticello landscape further hid slavery from visitors. A new approach road, less direct than the old one, “skirted the main agricultural endeavors [and] avoided all the domestic and industrial sites,” writes Sara Bon-Harper, one of Monticello's archaeologists. With the new arrangement of trees and roads, Jefferson could control almost everything his guests saw.
¹
There would be no accidental glimpses of overseers and slaves. Jefferson's plan, Bon-Harper continues, “effectively shielded the visitor from any views of industry or enslavement.” A guest who arrived via the new road in 1809, Margaret Bayard Smith, sensed that something was missing: “No vestige of the labour of man appeared; nature seemed to hold an undisturbed dominion…. I cast my eyes around, but could discern nothing but untamed woodland.”
²

The correspondence Jefferson saved has allowed posterity to portray him as an implacable enemy of slavery and a frustrated emancipationist, thanks to his fervent early views on the subject and thanks to the “soft answers” he sent to his abolitionist correspondents to soothe and baffle them. Meanwhile, in the public sphere, where he came to wield enormous power and influence, he did nothing to hasten slavery's end during his terms as a diplomat, secretary of state, vice president, and twice-elected president or after his presidency. After his death, when the Virginia Assembly fruitlessly bandied about emancipation plans, a pro-slavery legislator mockingly noted Jefferson's absence from this field of battle, but his mockery expressed a truth: “When Hercules died, there was no man left to lift his club.”
³

The difficult truth is that for decades Jefferson skillfully played both sides of the slavery question, maintaining his reputation as a liberal while doing nothing. One letter from 1796, long overlooked, caused excitement and confusion among specialists when it was rediscovered in 1997, for in it Jefferson seemed to favor the education of slave children—in integrated schools. It's worth looking closely at what he wrote, keeping in mind that Jefferson the lawyer always worded his correspondence meticulously. After conjuring the possibility of “instruction of the slaves…mixed with those of free condition,” he added that it was questionable whether such a plan should be extended beyond slave children “destined to be free”—an all-important clause.
⁴
Given that in 1796
no
slaves were destined to be free, this “proposal” cannot even be called hypothetical. Jefferson could only have had in mind that joyous (to him) day in the remote, misty future when ships would assemble to take the black people away; he was writing about the education they would receive before their exile.
^*
The seemingly radical, farseeing plan turns out to be just another soft answer, in this case addressed to Robert Pleasants, a Virginia Quaker who had in fact already set his slaves free (in 1782) and established a school (in 1784) for free black children.

Jefferson's image-making has been effective. In a 1995 analysis of Jefferson's record on race and slavery, Alexander O. Boulton insisted that Jefferson, “throughout the entire course of his life, maintained an abiding faith in an antislavery philosophy in his words and actions. It is difficult to understand Jefferson's ardent critique of all forms of authority and oppression without including his fervent antislavery beliefs.”
⁵

Boulton did not specify what “actions” Jefferson had taken, though he mentioned Jefferson's “thought,” his “faith,” his “beliefs” in general. Jefferson would have been delighted to read Boulton's essay, as it precisely conveys the impression he wished to propagate in his ample library of “soft answers.” Jefferson would have been doubly delighted at the essay's title, “The American Paradox,” signifying a condition of bafflement. George Ticknor, a visitor from Boston, had already in 1815 noted that in conversation Jefferson displayed a “love of paradox.”
⁶

Not so very long ago most historians thought that Jefferson's reputation would be permanently shredded if it were proved that he fathered children by Sally Hemings. John Chester Miller of Stanford declared in 1977 that if Jefferson did have an affair with Hemings, then he “deserves to be regarded as one of the most profligate liars and consummate hypocrites ever to occupy the presidency.”

But when Typhoon Hemings hit the SS
Jefferson
, something miraculous occurred: the great vessel heeled over, then slowly righted itself and steamed majestically on its way, flying new flags of multiculturalism and amelioration. Writers redefined the “adaptive and amoral” Jefferson as the lover of Sally Hemings and the secret, tormented father of a multiracial family. A leading Jefferson scholar, Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia, writes, “If anything, Jefferson's stock rebounded,” because “Jefferson as lover—no matter how unequal the lovers' power—is a more sympathetic character than Jefferson the owner and exploiter of his fellow human beings.” He asks, “Was…Jefferson's image shining more brightly than ever?”
⁸

Onuf's discussion appeared in a 2010 collection of essays titled
Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours
. As one reviewer of the book suggested, “The emerging consensus about Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings has tended to alleviate some of the tension between Jefferson as apostle of liberty and Jefferson as slaveholder.” Sally Hemings, having “humanized” her master, to a large extent now dominates the representation of Jefferson as a slaveholder. The same reviewer noted, “Hemings appears early and often in this book…. She has as many page citations in the index as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Jefferson's wife, Martha—combined. Clearly, we have entered a new phase in Jefferson studies, and Hemings has a lead role.”
⁹

To shift into this new phase requires, however, an enormous act of forgetting. Yes, the four Hemings children were, as Madison Hemings said, “free from the dread of having to be slaves all our lives long,” but the six hundred other African-Americans who labored for Jefferson were never free from that dread. Peter Fossett, put on the block and sold “like a horse,” humanizes what the historian Walter Johnson has rightly called “an economy in which everything was for sale: productive and reproductive labor but also sex and sentiment.” Fossett puts a face on “the obscene synthesis of humanity and interest, of person and thing, that underlay so much of Southern jurisprudence, the market in slaves, the daily discipline of slavery.”
¹⁰
That was the synthesis Jefferson formulated when he said that Providence had made his interests and duties coincide.

Forgotten also is Jefferson's blunt rationalization for enslaving African-Americans. Augustus John Foster, who visited Jefferson at Monticello in 1807, reported that “he considered them to be as far inferior to the rest of mankind as the mule is to the horse, and as made to carry burthens.”
¹¹

Peter Onuf writes of “the problematic image of the democratic founder who was profoundly hostile to slavery but could never extricate himself from an institution that guaranteed the welfare and well-being of his ‘country,' Virginia.”
¹²
But Jefferson never tried to extricate himself. The record of his actions suggests that he formulated a grand synthesis by which slavery became integral to the empire of liberty. Jefferson saw that slavery could build a bridge to a profitable future, that slavery reliably produced working capital both for aristocratic planter families like his own and for energetic strivers like his overseer Edmund Bacon. Shrewd, frugal, and an instinctive acquisitor, Bacon accumulated slaves and marched them into new land in Kentucky, where he established a prosperous farm. Not once did Jefferson urge Bacon to relinquish slavery as he had pushed Edward Coles to give up his emancipation plan.

In
American Sphinx
, Joseph Ellis mapped Jefferson's mind as a labyrinth of “capsules or compartments” arranged “to keep certain incompatible thoughts from encountering one another.”
¹³
But Ellis's labyrinth may represent our minds more than Jefferson's, for it is we who compartmentalize certain historical realities in order to preserve an innocent image of our beginnings. Thus David Brooks wrote in
The New York Times
in 2008: “The people who created this country built a moral structure around money…. The result was quite remarkable. The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth.”
¹⁴
The fact that slavery was the underpinning of much of America's founding wealth must be in a different compartment.

The syntax that biographers and historians use when they write about Jefferson is revealing. In books, articles, blogs, and websites, he strides across the American stage as a potent, overpowering actor: he built Monticello, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he engineered the Louisiana Purchase. But when it comes to slavery, suddenly Jefferson is not an active force but the pawn of historical forces beyond his control; he becomes a victim. Verbs go from the active to the passive voice; he is trapped by convention, by society, by laws, by his family, by debt. On the subject of debt, a historian writes, “The old patriarch's financial burdens…were staggering.” Were those burdens the result of Jefferson's faulty planning? Were they his responsibility? No. His debts were “brought on chiefly by the failure of his estate to handle his large obligations,” which is to say that his farms and the workers on them somehow let him down.
¹⁵

The biographer Merrill Peterson wrote in 1970 of Jefferson's extraordinary versatility “exploding in all directions…. Others might be content with what was; he could think only in terms of what should be.” Though it was considered “folly” to put a mansion on a hilltop, Jefferson would not be deterred: “He was born with an irrepressible urge to build.” When he dreamed of creating a great university in Virginia, he “built from the ground up” despite intense opposition. Yet on the subject of slavery, Peterson depicts Jefferson as hamstrung: “Until the institution itself could be extinguished, slavery was an evil he had to live with.” Jefferson knew that his overseers beat his slaves, including children, but Peterson absolves the master: “There were limits to his own superintendence.” With pathbreaking financial acumen Jefferson monetized his slaves and negotiated a very large foreign loan using slaves as collateral, but in Peterson's account Jefferson's slaves “were mortgaged,” as if some anonymous clerk had arranged the loan.
¹⁶

Sometimes the instinct to exonerate does its work by subtly softening the facts. When the University of Virginia Library put the will of Thaddeus Kosciuszko on display, the will in which he left Jefferson money specifically to free his slaves, the explanatory wall panel turned Kosciuszko's clear stipulation into a mere recommendation, noting that the will “named Jefferson the executor, suggesting that he use the money to liberate his slaves at Monticello.” Moreover, it added that “Jefferson would have been forbidden to do so by Virginia law,” although that is not true: freed slaves had to leave Virginia within a year of their manumission, but there was no legal bar to freeing them, nor to their being educated.

Many writers on slavery today have emphasized the “agency” of the enslaved people, insisting that we pay heed to the efforts of the slaves to resist their condition and assert their humanity under a dehumanizing system.
¹⁷
But as slaves gain “agency” in historical analyses, the masters seem to lose it. As the slaves become heroic figures, triumphing over their condition, slave owners recede as historical actors and are replaced by a faceless system of “context” and “forces.” So we end up with slavery somehow afloat in a world in which nobody is responsible. One historian writes about Monticello's slaves as if they had no master: “There is every indication that they grasped the baleful position they had been born into, and knew that forces were actively working to keep them down.”
¹⁸