Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (4 page)

In the winter of 1769, Samuel Howell, a mixed-race indentured servant who had escaped from his master, sought a lawyer in Williamsburg to represent him in suing for freedom. His grandmother was a free white woman, but his grandfather was black, so Howell had become entrapped in a law that prescribed indentured servitude to age thirty-one for certain mixed-race people “to prevent that abominable mixture of white men or women with negroes or mulattoes.”
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Howell, aged twenty-seven, was not indentured forever, since he would be freed in about four years, but nonetheless Jefferson felt angry enough over this denial of rights that he took Howell's case pro bono.

Jefferson later became famous for his diatribes against racial mixing, but his arguments on behalf of Howell, made more than a decade before he wrote down his infamous racial theories, suggest that the younger Jefferson harbored doubts about the supposed “evil” of miscegenation. The word “seems” in the following sentence suggests that he did not quite accept the prevailing racial ideology: “The purpose of the act was to punish and deter women from that confusion of species, which the legislature seems to have considered as an evil.”

Having just one black grandparent, Howell probably appeared very nearly white. But with the full knowledge that Howell had African blood, Jefferson argued to the justices that he should be immediately freed. He made his case partly on a strict reading of the original law, which imposed servitude only on the first generation of mixed-race children and could not have been intended, Jefferson argued, “to oppress their innocent offspring.” He continued: “it remains for some future legislature, if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [the punishment of servitude] to the grandchildren and other issue more remote.” Jefferson went further, declaring to the court: “Under the law of nature, all men are born free,” a concept he derived from his reading of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, the concept that would later form the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. In the Howell case, Jefferson deployed it in defense of a man of African descent.

Jefferson's close reading of the statutes and his invocation of the law of nature left the justices unmoved. At the conclusion of Jefferson's argument the opposing attorney stood up to begin his response, “but the Court interrupted him,” as Jefferson recalled, and issued a summary judgment against Howell.

The young Jefferson was not finished with his campaign against “unremitting despotism.” In a few short lines he sketched out a solution: free the slaves and make them citizens. “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa.” So wrote Jefferson in the summer of 1774. He wove that declaration into a statement intended for presentation to a gathering of Virginia's dissidents, then to a national congress of colonial representatives, and ultimately to King George III. It rehearses many of the points Jefferson later put into the Declaration of Independence. As he worked through the process of writing the nation into existence, he envisioned not only freedom for the slaves but also their “enfranchisement,” their incorporation into the citizenry. Given his later history and the tenor of his times, the formula sounds preposterous, but that is what he proposed. He was trying to pull the people far beyond where they thought they could go. His cousin Edmund Randolph, who heard the document read aloud in Williamsburg, commented that “it constituted a part of Mr. Jefferson's pride to run before the times in which he lived.”
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A moment of political crisis had inspired Jefferson. Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had just dissolved one legislature for its radical tendencies and was refusing to seat another, so the legislators decided to meet unofficially in Williamsburg. A gathering of freeholders in Albemarle County chose Jefferson as one of their two delegates to the Williamsburg conference and voted their approval of a set of resolutions he laid before them. He forged these talking points into a fiery manifesto,
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
.

Jefferson's “glowing sentences” in
Summary View
, observes Dumas Malone, were “written in the white heat of indignation.” Declaiming the doctrine of natural rights, Jefferson “regarded himself as the spokesman of a free people who had derived their rights from God and the laws.”
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Ascending to a “prophetic” tone, Jefferson “grounded his argument on the nature of things—as they were in the beginning and evermore should be.” Jefferson was not in a compromising mood, and his statement, Malone says, “left no place…for tyranny of any sort.”
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Jefferson himself said that
Summary View
was “penned in the language of truth” and free from “expressions of servility.”
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In his passionate defense of liberty he staked out an extreme position. Edmund Randolph thought that
Summary View
offered “a range of inquiry…marching far beyond the politics of the day.”
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A modern historian concurs: “Broader and even more prescient are references to the rights of ‘human nature,' which Jefferson daringly ascribed even to the chattel slaves.”
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Summary View
makes no mention of exiling the blacks after freeing them. The clear implication is that people of African descent had natural rights and deserved a place in this country as free people.

Randolph reported that
some
sections of the document were received with enthusiasm, others not. “I distinctly recollect the applause bestowed on [most of the resolutions], when they were read to a large company…. Of all, the approbation was not equal.” But the whole document was embraced by “several of the author's admirers,” who paid to have it printed and circulated as a pamphlet.
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Summary View
, its incendiary provision about slavery intact, won Jefferson a wide reputation as an eloquent spokesman for liberty and led to his selection to write the Declaration of Independence.

The Howell case and
Summary View
cast light on the enduring question of the meaning of the phrase “all men.” When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” could he have possibly meant to include the slaves? The usual answer is no. It has seemed evident that Jefferson expected the word “white” to be silently added before “men.” But when he wrote
Summary View
, he included the Africans under the law of nature, and when he argued for Howell, he declared that
all
men are born free, without qualification.
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In his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson denounced the slave trade in terms that summon to mind the two-step process of emancipation he had proposed in
Summary View
: first, the abolition of the slave trade; second, the “enfranchisement of the slaves we have.” John Chester Miller writes: “The inclusion of Jefferson's strictures on slavery and the slave trade would have committed the United States to the abolition of slavery.”
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Thus when the Continental Congress deleted Jefferson's attack on the slave trade, it drained out the full implications of “all men are created equal.”

Jefferson had overthrown millennia and set everyone free. He had undone Aristotle's ancient formula—“from the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule”—which had governed human affairs until 1776.
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In search of “original intent,” we can gather evidence from original hearers. Massachusetts freed its slaves on the strength of the Declaration of Independence, weaving Jefferson's language into the state constitution of 1780, giving it the force of law. A court in Massachusetts affirmed this end to slavery in 1783 because the state constitution had “ratified the doctrine that all men were created free and equal,” as John Chester Miller writes.
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The Vermont Constitution had abolished slavery even earlier, in 1777.

The meaning of “all men” sounded equally clear, and so disturbing to the authors of the constitutions of six Southern states that they emended Jefferson's wording. “All
free
men,” they wrote in their founding documents, “are equal.” The authors of those state constitutions knew what Jefferson meant, could not accept it, and sought to nullify the Declaration's intent within their borders.
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As Edmund Randolph observed, it was Jefferson's pride “to run before the times in which he lived.” We do not quite grasp how far in advance of his times he was running. We tend to look at Jefferson backward, projecting his later statements onto the young man; but the young Jefferson was a firebrand. Jefferson's first two public declarations of natural rights were both linked to the rights of people of color. His third pronouncement, the Declaration itself, flowed from the first two. The celestial notion of natural rights gained sufficient hold over him to overpower any aversion he had to what Virginia law called “abominable mixture.” The racial barrier had been breached long ago, and it was “wicked” to defend it any longer.

Another, more personal absolute may have weighed on his conscience. For two years, since his marriage in 1772, he had been the owner of his wife's blood kin, for Martha Jefferson had six slaves who were her half siblings and therefore now his in-laws. This was an absolute of blood, a parallel genealogical reality of in-laws not recognized in law. His marriage had thrust him very deeply into the realm where people had the “double aspect” of being both humanity and property. This erased any clear-cut sense of separation between the races and any comfortable notion of who was destined to be a slave and who was destined to be free.

Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton on New Year's Day 1772 at the Forest, her father's plantation outside Williamsburg. Jefferson was then twenty-nine; the bride, though only twenty-three, was already a widow. At age eighteen she had married Bathurst Skelton, who died in 1768, less than two years into their marriage. An early biographer described Martha as “distinguished for her beauty, her accomplishments, and her solid merit…a little above medium height, slightly but exquisitely formed. Her complexion was brilliant.” She had large eyes “of the richest shade of hazel—her luxuriant hair of the finest tinge of auburn.”
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Martha rode, danced, played the spinet and harpsichord, and shared her husband's love of literature.

The couple left the Wayles plantation in a carriage during a light fall of snow; by the time they reached Monticello, the snow was eighteen inches deep. Their daughter later described the “horrible dreariness” of the scene. At that time Monticello was little more than a construction site. One small building had been completed—a one-room brick pavilion that still stands at the end of the south terrace. On the mountain all was dark and silent. The couple had to step carefully to avoid tumbling into the unfinished pit of Monticello's cellar, outlined in snow. The next morning Jefferson went out to measure the snow—three feet, which remains the heaviest snowfall ever recorded in Virginia. Nine months later Martha gave birth to their first child.
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In the next ten years she gave birth to six children, but only two survived to adulthood and had children.

Martha Wayles brought Jefferson a rich inheritance of land and slaves as well as a dowry of another sort—emotional and blood ties to her enslaved half siblings. After the death of his third wife in 1761 (when Martha was twelve), John Wayles had begun a relationship with his mixed-race slave Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings; it lasted until Wayles's death twelve years later.
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Born about 1735 to a slave woman and an English sea captain, Elizabeth Hemings was in her mid-twenties when her relationship with Wayles began. She already had four children, Mary, Martin, Betty Brown, and Nance, whose father, or fathers, are not known. With Wayles she had six children—Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally. And she had two more children, John and Lucy, at Monticello.
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Betty Hemings's family was fortunate to remain intact when Wayles died. All of them came into Jefferson's possession. The Granger family, whom Martha felt very close to, had been separated and sold away. But Martha was determined to reunite them. Just after the marriage, she told Jefferson that she was “very desirous to get a favorite house woman of the name of Ursula.”
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So he traveled fifty miles to an estate auction to bid on Ursula Granger and her two sons, George and Bagwell, who were fourteen and five years old.

Acceding to his wife's wishes cost Jefferson a great deal of money, since he had to pay £210 for Ursula and the children. As it happened, Ursula's owner had died owing money to the estate of Martha's late husband, Bathurst Skelton. Eager to recoup as much of this debt as possible, Bathurst's brother Meriwether turned up at the auction. Knowing that his former sister-in-law was set on having Ursula, he engaged Jefferson in a bidding war, converting Martha Jefferson's feelings for the Grangers into cash. Jefferson later complained that Meriwether had “run me up to 210£, an exorbitant price.”
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From another owner in another distant county Jefferson retrieved Ursula's husband, George, for £130. He became known at Monticello as “Great George.” The Grangers became cornerstones of the Monticello establishment.

Jefferson, too, had a connection to a particular slave. He had grown up with Jupiter, born at Shadwell the same year as he. If they followed the custom of the time, the two of them were playmates and companions in fishing and hunting, though Jefferson left no recollection of this. When Jefferson attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Jupiter went with him as his personal servant. (Decades later, when Jefferson drew up regulations for the University of Virginia, he forbade students to have their slaves with them, which he thought ruined the character of young white men.) Jefferson and Jupiter, who likely had the surname Evans, married women from the same plantation, Jefferson marrying Martha Wayles and Jupiter marrying Suck, a Wayles slave. Their courtships took place simultaneously; Jupiter met his future wife when he accompanied Jefferson to the Wayles plantation as valet.
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Jupiter lost his position when the Hemings family arrived at Monticello and took over most of the household posts. Twelve-year-old Robert Hemings became Jefferson's personal servant, and Jupiter was put in charge of the plantation's horses and coach. He may have had a better knack with horses than anyone else and may have preferred more manly, physical work than shaving, dressing, and following his master about. But the decision to shift assignments may have been Martha's; she might have preferred to have a young Hemings she knew well bustling around the private rooms rather than a man her husband's age.

Jupiter won Jefferson's trust to a truly extraordinary degree. When cash had to be delivered or collected, Jefferson often sent Jupiter. Cash is one thing; gunpowder is quite another. Jupiter became Jefferson's explosives expert, skilled at pulverizing rock, quarrying limestone, and general construction blasting. Had he been so inclined, Jupiter could have blown up Monticello. Jefferson bought the indenture of a white stonecutter and apprenticed Jupiter to him. Jupiter then shaped the four Doric limestone columns still standing at the main entrance to Monticello.
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Although the Hemingses are the best-known family among Monticello's enslaved people, the Grangers and Evanses also had very close ties to the Jeffersons that lasted generations. There is no indication that Jefferson had even a distant kinship tie to these two families, but they held posts of trust and responsibility.

In the winter of 1774, Jefferson started his Farm Book, the plantation ledger he would keep until his death, writing out a census of the 45 slaves he received from his parents, the 135 from the Wayles estate, and 5 he had purchased. He owned the future: the census included the astonishing total of 79 children under the age of fourteen. About 40 percent of Jefferson's slaves were children.
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It is always dangerous to read too much into small details, but in studying Jefferson's Farm Book, I was struck by the calligraphy. Most of the ledger showed a cramped, businesslike script on pages jammed with names and dates, as the master struggled to keep up with the business of running the plantation—births and deaths, work assignments, allotments of food and blankets, purchases and sales. But at the beginning, when Jefferson first set down the names of the people who had come into his possession, the writing is beautiful, and the pages have an elegant copperplate look. Pride of possession? Perhaps—but it seemed more likely a sign of respect, or rather recognition, as Jefferson recorded the families.

Jefferson's architectural papers contain an intriguing document, probably dating to the mid-1770s, when the Monticello household was taking shape. Jefferson sketched out plans for a row of substantial, dignified neoclassical houses with stone or brick hearths and ample windows for “George and his family” and “Betty Hemings and her family.” On the list of possible occupants he put the names of slaves and white workmen, having in mind an integrated row of residences.
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The buildings were going to have identical facades and two different interior arrangements. Interior “No. 1” would have four bedrooms around a central hall with a communal fireplace; such a dwelling would be appropriate for “Betty Hemings and her family.” Interior “No. 2” could house two slave families, with a single large room for each family, heated by a fireplace, and no central hall. No. 2 would also be appropriate for unmarried white workers.

It was no small thing to use architecture to make a visible equality of the races. Jefferson's theoretical vision of natural rights inherent in everyone, regardless of race, would have become real on his mountain had he actually built this row of houses, but he did not. Perhaps they were too expensive, or too radical. Later he backed away from equality in housing and always gave whites the larger, more solid, and more comfortable accommodations.
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It was not unusual for slaves to sleep where they worked. It saved money on housing, made them efficient, and had the psychological effect of making them identify totally with what they did. But it also separated them from their families. One of Monticello's cooks, Ursula Granger, had responsibility for the smokehouse and washhouse. Her son Isaac recalled, “She was pastry cook and washerwoman; stayed in the laundry”—and by “stayed” he meant that she slept there. Ursula's husband, George, probably slept elsewhere, since he was needed in the fields at first light. Young Isaac slept alone, apart from his parents, in a pavilion where the white children had their schoolroom. His job was to light the fire before dawn so the room would be warm when “the scholars” came in. Other slaves on Mulberry Row bedded down and ate their meals in the tiny dairy room and in the nailery storeroom.
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For more than twenty-five years Ursula was a “mammy” to Thomas Jefferson's children, whom she wet-nursed, and then to his grandchildren. When an infant became ill, Jefferson recorded the child being restored to health “almost instantaneously by a good breast of milk” from Ursula.
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Martha's health was poor from the first year of the marriage, when a doctor came to see her almost once a month. In ten years Martha gave birth six times; gaps of weeks or months in her accounts suggest that she was often too weak to attend to the household. Jack McLaughlin writes, “Throughout much of her ten-year marriage to Jefferson, she was either pregnant, nursing, grieving the death of an infant, or sick from the complications of childbirth.” He notes that she bore up under these strains during “the difficult years of the American Revolution and in an unfinished house, littered with workmen's debris, while simultaneously undergoing the physical and emotional stress of multiple pregnancies and infant death.”
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Martha's account books show that when her health permitted it, she oversaw the brewing of immense amounts of beer; the slaughtering of ducks, geese, and hogs; weaving, sewing, soapmaking, and candlemaking. Her accounts record the production of fabrics in a spectrum of quality, depending on who would wear them: “fine linen shirts [for] Jefferson,” “fine mixt cloth for the children [her own],” “mixt cloth for the house servants,” and, for the “out negroes,” “hemp linen” and “coarse linen.” She bartered bacon to the slaves in exchange for their chickens. She supervised the preparation of meat for her own family and for the white workers: “packed up for our own eating 28 hams of bacon 21 shoulders 27 middlengs. packed up for workmen 40 hams 50 shoulders.”
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Every day, as Isaac recalled, she descended to the kitchen to give instructions to Ursula: “Mrs. Jefferson would come out there with a cookery book in her hand and read out of it to Isaac's mother how to make cakes, tarts, and so on.”
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When Ursula looked after the Jefferson children and grandchildren, she sang to them and told them folktales “to pass away the long lonely winter and cheer up the evenings.”
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Repeated endlessly on an endless chain of winter nights, these songs and stories became fixed in the memory of Jefferson's daughter Martha. In 1816 she sang five songs from memory and dictated two lengthy folktales to a visiting Frenchman. Another family member commented that “although Jefferson's ears seemed to be closed to all but the European mode, his daughter Martha kept her ears open. She had a large store of songs and tales that she had picked up from the black people around her. It was authentic material, of which the later minstrel shows were no more than a caricature.”
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For example, young Martha learned a “corn song,” a tune with a repetitive chorus sung “when the negroes were employed in extracting the grains from the ears of corn,” and a song with verses about slaves taking the master's horses on nighttime excursions away from the plantation.

The folktales Ursula told had their origins in Africa. In one, a character named Mammy Dinah escapes a demon by climbing into a tree and humming a song to summon her fierce guard dogs, which possess supernatural powers. Just as the demon is about to devour Dinah, the dogs arrive: “They fell upon the evil genie and tore him to pieces, thus delivering Mammy Dinah forever from her mortal enemy.” In another tale a devious fox talks his way into the home of a rabbit and then casually announces, “I am in a hurry to feast on some of your tender bones.” Keeping his presence of mind, the rabbit tricks the fox into hiding in a box and then drenches his trapped enemy in boiling water, “which ended his days.”

In addition to these allegories of the struggle between good and evil in the world, Ursula sang the children a song called “Captain Shields,” about the real-life depredations of a Richmond policeman:

As the Frenchman explained in his notes to this song, “For a time, Captain Shields of Richmond's City Police, was a severe and vigilant man, and who in the exercise of his functions, came often to trouble the negroes in their excessive noisy pastimes. So they held him in horror, and their only possible means of vengeance was to make him the theme of their songs, in which they represented him as a hunter and themselves as hares and marmots or raccoons.”