Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (5 page)

In the long succession of evenings with songs and stories by the fireside, an intimate, enduring relationship took shape among the Jeffersons, Hemingses, Grangers, and Evanses. The Jeffersons owned everyone, but human attachments softened the underlying brutality of slavery. The care of children brought the families together. When Martha was sick, the Hemingses tended her and kept the household running; Ursula took over wet-nursing the Jeffersons' infants as she gave birth to her own children.

We cannot fully know the nature of these relationships—everything here, even the birth of children, had multiple meanings—but we can see outward signs. Several Monticello slaves left personal recollections of Jefferson and his family that suggest emotional bonds founded upon the shared experience of living in the same place for decades. Asked to reminisce about Jefferson, several slaves summoned up warm memories of their master. On the other side of the divide, however, Jefferson left no intimate account of the Monticello slaves.

The families grew in tandem, and they knew each other's lineages directly, by the entries in the master's ledger book and by oral history. Thus George and Ursula's son Isaac could summon from memory, as late as 1847, the lineage of his long-dead mistress, whom he had known when he was a small child: “Mrs. Jefferson was named Patsy Wayles, but when Mr. Jefferson married her she was the Widow Skelton, widow of Batter [Bathurst] Skelton.”
¹⁹
On the one hand, he knew this as one knows the details of a title search, because the Grangers had passed through the ownership and auctions of those families. But on the other hand, as an old man Isaac kept in his mind's eye the images of the whites he had grown up with: “Mrs. Jefferson was small…. Patsy Jefferson was tall like her father. Polly low like her mother and longways the handsomest, pretty lady jist like her mother.”
²⁰

Madison Hemings, at an even later date, could summon up the story of Thomas and Martha Jefferson's courtship, which had occurred more than thirty years before Madison was born, but his elders had watched closely and passed down the account of it: “Thos. Jefferson was a visitor at the ‘great house' of John Wales…. He formed the acquaintance of his daughter Martha…and intimacy sprang up between them which ripened into love, and they were married.”
²¹
That phrase “ripened into love” bespeaks a close eye for human feelings; the slaves had seen arranged marriages, and this was not one of them.

As Thomas Jefferson had grown up alongside Jupiter, his grandson Jeff Randolph grew up alongside Jupiter's son, Phil Evans, about two years older than he. Jeff said that Evans “was my companion in childhood and friend throughout life,” describing him as “small, active, intelligent, much of a humourist.”
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The bonds formed in childhood proved lasting. In 1819, when Jeff was viciously attacked by his drunken, half-mad brother-in-law, Charles Bankhead, in the courthouse square in Charlottesville, Phil Evans galloped to get a doctor from a distant town, there being none available in Charlottesville. During Jeff's difficult recovery from the attack, Evans held him in his arms when his master became feverish and passed out. When Jeff regained consciousness, “Phil was holding me in his arms with his eyes streaming with tears.”

The lore and literature of plantations show time and again that people held in slavery formed profound attachments to the families who owned them. These relationships baffled outsiders, who saw the fact of enslavement but not the decades of intimacy that led to the slaves' extraordinary acts of kindness and loyalty. After the Civil War a visiting Northerner, astonished at the stories she had heard, asked a former slave how he could risk his life for the family that enslaved him. The answer was that the slaves had not lost a sense of common humanity. “Often we left our own wives and children during the war in order to take care of the wives and children of our absent masters. And why did we do this? Because they were helpless and afraid, while our families were better able to take care of themselves, and had no fear.”
²³
When they saw their “oppressors” stricken with fear, they did not rise up in vengeance but offered help.

In his recollections of the slaves he had grown up with, Jeff Randolph declared, “they would run any risk for my protection.” When the Revolutionary War brought life-or-death moments of crisis, Jefferson's slaves also ran those risks for him.

Elected governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, Jefferson moved his family first to Williamsburg and then to Richmond, taking an entourage of Hemingses, Grangers, and other slaves to run his household and look after Martha and the Jeffersons' three small children. Isaac recalled the wartime events many years later. He was only about five years old at the time, but records confirm the accuracy of many of his recollections. Speaking of himself in the third person, he said, “Isaac remembers coming down to Williamsburg in a wagon at the time Mr. Jefferson was Governor. He came down in the phaeton, his family with him in a coach and four. Bob Hemings drove the phaeton; Jim Hemings was a body servant; Martin Hemings the butler.” Ill after childbirth, Martha Jefferson needed all the assistance she could get from her servants.

In January 1781 the turncoat Benedict Arnold landed in Virginia with a powerful invasion force of British soldiers and began to lay waste. Much of Virginia's militia was occupied far to the west of the state fighting Indians, and the defense forces available to Governor Jefferson were scattered and poorly equipped. Learning of the approach of the British raiders, Jefferson sent his family out of Richmond and then returned to the governor's house in the capital. Isaac Granger remembered that Jefferson took a spyglass up to the attic window to watch for the invaders.

A relief column unexpectedly appeared and set up several cannon, to the delight of Richmond's inhabitants, who greeted the rescuers with hearty hurrahs. But then the cannon boomed, and, as Isaac recalled, “everybody knew it was the British.” As cannonballs knocked the top off a butcher's house, “the butcher's wife screamed out and holler'd and her children too and all.” The ensuing panic was instant and total. Isaac remarked: “In ten minutes not a white man was to be seen in Richmond.” Jefferson called for his strongest horse, Caractacus, and galloped off.

The arrival of the invaders, to the grim beating of drums, terrified young Isaac: “it was an awful sight—seemed like the Day of Judgment was come.” Isaac remembered that his mother “was so skeered, she didn't know whether to stay indoors or out.” But his father, George, kept calm and turned his attention to the task of saving Jefferson's most valuable possessions. He went through the house gathering all the silver, which he laid in a bed tick “and hid it under a bed in the kitchen.” When the British marched up, Granger was prepared.

“Whar is the Governor?” demanded a mounted officer.

“He's gone to the mountains,” Granger replied, giving a vaguely accurate but perfectly useless answer.

“Whar is the silver?”

“It was all sent up to the mountains.”

The British searched the house, smashed Jefferson's wine bottles, emptied the corncrib for their horses and the smokehouse for their own knapsacks, but they did not find the Jefferson silver.

Assuming that his family would be safe, Granger left them in Richmond and set off west to aid his master's family. But the day after sacking the governor's house, the British returned and grabbed little Isaac. “When Isaac's mother found they was gwine to car him away, she thought they was gwine to leave her. She was cryin' and hollerin'.” The British took her as well.

The British hunted Governor Jefferson fruitlessly, raiding the plantation west of Richmond where he had hidden his family, only to find the quarry gone. After placing Martha and the children at a farm deeper in the interior, Jefferson tried to organize Virginia's defenders as best he could. The British withdrew to the east, carrying off many slaves, leaving Richmond a shambles, and permanently scarring Jefferson's reputation as a wartime leader. The tumultuous winter ended with a personal tragedy: the Jeffersons' infant daughter Lucy died in April.

The following month the British returned, more determined than before to hunt Jefferson down. Once again British raiders swarmed into Richmond, forcing Jefferson and the legislature to abandon the capital and reconvene seventy miles west in Charlottesville. The British commander, Lord Cornwallis, ordered Colonel Banastre Tarleton to lead his elite unit of dragoons on a lightning raid to “disturb the assembly.”
²⁴
Tarleton's column halted at a country tavern, where a burly young militiaman, Jack Jouett, correctly guessed that they were on their way to seize the governor and the legislators. He galloped through the night to warn the Jeffersons.

Once more, the frail Martha Jefferson and her two small daughters climbed aboard a carriage to be trundled over rough mountain roads to a hideout. A second man who had gone up to Monticello to warn Jefferson found the governor “perfectly tranquil,” though he was hastening to pack up as many private papers as he could.
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Jefferson barely escaped capture, leaping onto Caractacus just as the dragoons were closing in.

What happened next became part of the oral tradition of the Jefferson family. Jefferson's grandchildren Ellen Coolidge and Jeff Randolph eagerly shared the story in the 1850s with the biographer Henry Randall, who noted that the grandchildren had “repeatedly heard all the particulars from [Jefferson's] lips.”

When the raiders swarmed into the house at Monticello, it quickly became apparent that once again Jefferson had eluded them, but they knew he could not be very far off. So one of the dragoons jammed a pistol into Martin Hemings's chest and said he would shoot if Hemings did not tell them where the governor had gone.

“Fire away, then,” Hemings replied, and refused to say anything else.
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Martin Hemings was not one of the half siblings of Mrs. Jefferson. His mother had borne him before she began her relationship with John Wayles, so his kinship tie to the Jeffersons was not as direct as that of his younger siblings fathered by Wayles. As the Jefferson grandchildren recounted the story, Hemings stood his ground, “fiercely answering glance for glance, and not receding a hair's breadth from the muzzle of the cocked pistol.” Unbeknownst to the British, another servant named Caesar lay in silence beneath their feet under the floor of the portico with silver he and Martin had just finished hiding when the raiding party rushed in.

As Hemings stared down the dragoons, his owner made his escape, galloping down obscure mountain paths. Jefferson gathered up his family from a plantation outside Charlottesville. Together they made their way west and then south. Not everyone along the route was eager to help the rebellious governor and author of the Declaration of Independence. According to Jeff Randolph, when Jefferson knocked at a house seeking refuge, the owner “refused to take him in, fearing he might be…punished for harboring him.”
²⁷

Traveling alone, Jefferson made a brief return to Monticello, where he learned what Hemings and Caesar had done for him. With the British still hunting him, Jefferson went to ground with his family at his farm ninety miles southwest, Poplar Forest, a property he had inherited from Wayles.

George Granger's heroism may have led Jefferson to set him free, but the record is ambiguous. In his memoir, Granger's son Isaac said that his father “got his freedom by it. But he continued to sarve Mr. Jefferson and had forty pounds from Old Master and his wife.” There is no direct evidence for this manumission in the records, but Jefferson's list of taxable servants includes two free people, one of whom might have been George Granger.
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Hiding out at Poplar Forest, Jefferson resumed work on a manuscript that would be his only book,
Notes on the State of Virginia
. With the loyalty and heroism of Granger, Hemings, and Caesar still fresh in his mind, Jefferson considered the future, pondering the questions, Who will live in this new country? Who is an American and who is not?

Notes on the State of Virginia
is the Dismal Swamp that every Jefferson biographer must sooner or later attempt to cross, the infamous tract in which Jefferson claims that blacks are inferior, notoriously remarking that African women copulated with apes. With fabrications, hypocrisies, and ludicrous “twistifications”
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(that marvelous Jeffersonian word), Jefferson puts the blame for slavery on the slaves.

Jefferson began writing
Notes
in the midst of the wartime chaos in Virginia. With the British on his trail and the duties of government weighing upon him, Jefferson cleared time to write detailed answers to a questionnaire sent out by an official of the French legation in Philadelphia to representatives of each American state. Eager for information about the new nation taking shape, the French diplomat posed twenty-three “Queries” on such points as each state's borders, rivers, ports, mountains, mines, climate, population, laws, religion, and manners. In the fall of 1780, Jefferson had begun gathering notes and formulating his answers, taking great pleasure in a task that was “making me much better acquainted with my own country than I ever was before.”
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Chased by British raiders from Richmond and then from Monticello to his refuge at Poplar Forest, Jefferson still managed to complete a draft of his answers, which he sent to the French official late in 1781.

Writing as an American scientist and philosopher, and a Virginian, to the tight community of French scientists and philosophers, Jefferson did not anticipate that the manuscript would become public. A few years later he expanded and revised his responses, intending to have a small private printing made in Philadelphia for acquaintances who had asked to see his work, but the cost was prohibitive. After many second thoughts and misgivings, he had
Notes
published in France, where he was sent in 1784 as U.S. minister, and later in England.
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Later in life he shed his misgivings and urged abolitionists to read
Notes
for an accurate and unchanging expression of his views.

Jefferson wrote
Notes
as a defense against allegations of American inferiority. He took up the task and pursued it despite so many difficulties and distractions because in his view some French intellectuals had slighted and slandered the New World. The noted naturalist and
philosophe
Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, had put forth, as Jefferson wrote, “this new theory” which held that the plants and the Native people of the New World were runts. The Native Americans, Buffon proclaimed, were weak, not fully developed, defective, and poorly endowed in a very crucial aspect: “The savage is feeble, and has small organs of generation.” No wonder that Jefferson rushed to the New World's defense.

Buffon had written that the Native American “is also less sensitive, and yet more timid and cowardly; he has no vivacity, no activity of mind; the activity of his body is less an exercise, a voluntary motion, than a necessary action caused by want; relieve him of hunger and thirst, and you deprive him of all his movements; he will rest stupidly upon his legs and lying down entire days.”

Another Frenchman, the Abbé Raynal, advanced the very disturbing theory that white people deteriorated when they emigrated from Europe to the New World. As proof the abbé pointed out that “America has not yet produced one good poet.” In
Notes
, Jefferson responded that it had required great expanses of time before “the Greeks…produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton,” so America should be given some time.

As for the charge that the New World had not yielded “one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science,” Jefferson pointed to the accomplishments of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the Philadelphia scientist David Rittenhouse, the last ranking “second to no astronomer living…in genius he must be the first, because he is self-taught.” In many fields of endeavor, Jefferson declared, “we might shew that America, though but a child of yesterday, has already given hopeful proofs of genius…. We therefore suppose, that this reproach is as unjust as it is unkind.”

Jefferson did not have to mention slavery at all, since the questionnaire did not ask about it. But he addressed this uncomfortable subject because the persistence of slavery in the land of liberty put the new nation in a very awkward position. Virginia's revolutionaries “found themselves partners in the liberal vanguard of their times, and were properly embarrassed at a stigma from which their other partners were free,” as the historian Robert McColley observes.
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Having accused King George of attempting to enslave them, American leaders laid themselves open to the charge of hypocrisy by their failure to end slavery in their own country. Samuel Johnson jibed, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Slavery had been outlawed in England's home island, though not in its colonies, in the landmark 1772
Somerset
decision by an activist judge, who concluded that enslavement was such an egregious denial of rights that slavery had to be specifically authorized by law, and Parliament had never done so. When there were calls for Parliament to pass enabling legislation for black slavery, the proposal was derided in a widely circulated joke, which was eventually published in
The Virginia Gazette
: “If Negroes are to be Slaves on account of colour, the next step will be to enslave every mulatto in the kingdom, then all the Portuguese, next the French, then the brown complexioned English, and so on until there be only one free man left, which will be the man of palest complexion in the three kingdoms.”
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In the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had written that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” required Americans to state their case for independence. Though most of
Notes
is a detailed description of Virginia, in several sections it becomes a public-relations tract aimed at the international intelligentsia, explaining to a candid world the persistence of slavery in a nation taking shape upon the foundation of universal natural rights.

Jefferson did not attempt to paint a benevolent portrait of slavery. He acknowledged that the existence of slavery in Virginia had exerted “an unhappy influence” on the manners of white people, making them tyrants, destroying their morals: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” Young white Virginians were “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny…stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
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Slavery destroyed the industriousness of whites: “no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour.”

Jefferson made it plain that his country trampled upon the rights of the slaves. Who could blame them if they stole? “That disposition to theft with which they have been branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense. The man, in whose favour no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favour of others.”

In the infamous passages of
Notes
, Jefferson speculates that blacks were in some ways, possibly, inferior to whites, but in any case were unquestionably
different
, and the difference was “fixed in nature.” They looked different, they smelled different, they thought, felt, and loved differently from whites.

“The first difference which strikes us is that of colour.” Speaking as a naturalist, he had to admit that he did not know precisely where “the black of the negro resides.” It might be “in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself.” He did not know what caused it—“whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion.” In any case, “the difference is fixed in nature,” and it was “real.”

“Is this difference of no importance?” Jefferson asked rhetorically. He claimed that color had tremendous importance because skin color was the foundation of human beauty, and because black skin rendered the slaves impenetrable to the master's gaze, made their responses and thoughts inscrutable; “eternal monotony…reigns in the countenances”; an “immoveable veil of black…covers all the emotions.”
^†

Jefferson said that white people's “flowing hair” and “more elegant symmetry of form” made them more sexually attractive than blacks. He claimed that all blacks lusted after whites. In triumphant proof, he wrote the ill-famed phrase—that black people seek sex with white people “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species.” Jefferson had extracted this tidbit from Buffon's report of travelers' accounts of apes kidnapping and raping African women. Jefferson probably summoned up the fantastical image of an ape mating with an African woman to deflect attention from the actual reality of Virginia society—the pervasive rape of black women by white men.

Seeming to assume that his readers in the French community of Encyclopedists and
philosophes
might have seen very few Africans, Jefferson presented a scientific description: “there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites.” Blacks seemed to be indefatigable—“they seem to require less sleep”—though not in a productive way: “A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning.”

He enumerated racial differences in the emotions: “They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.” He declared that “their griefs are transient,” that the “numberless afflictions” of their lives “are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them,” which led him to the conclusion: “In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

In memory he judged “they are equal to the whites,” but “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous” and “in reason much inferior,” advancing as proof that it would be all but impossible to find a black person “capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” (One might ask how many white Virginians could comprehend Euclid.) By this very imperfect logic Jefferson concluded that blacks were innately mentally inferior: “It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.” It was essential to Jefferson's purpose that he establish in the minds of his readers that
nature
had produced the distinction and Jefferson was merely observing it, that he prove that black inferiority sprang from nature, whose laws ruled existence. But as John Stuart Mill observed: “Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?”
⁷

Having stated his contention, Jefferson backed away from it: “Further observation” was needed to verify the “conjecture” of inferiority, to be sure that “nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head.” Elsewhere he wrote that it was only “the opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination,” and “a suspicion only.” These conjectures, opinions, and suspicions “must be hazarded with great diffidence.” To achieve certainty, the subject under discussion, in this case, human beings, had to be “submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents,” and Jefferson the scientist was not prepared to go that far. He contradicted himself in another section where he wrote that slavery compels the concealment of talents, that the slave “must lock up the faculties of his nature.”

Though he argued that the griefs of the blacks were transient, he admitted that the slave had the ability to see into the future, where he could perceive “his own miserable condition” passed perpetually to “the endless generations proceeding from him.”

 

Jefferson wrote
Notes
at a time when Revolutionary fervor made some leading Virginians question slavery, while others began freeing their own slaves because of religious principles. Quakers and the new “dissenting” sects of Baptists and Methodists campaigned against slavery as an affront to the Almighty.

Virginia came close to outlawing the continuation of slavery. When its legislature was putting together a new state constitution—just before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence—George Mason submitted a draft that stated “all men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural Rights, of which they can not by any Compact, deprive or divest their Posterity.” This declaration would have ended perpetual, hereditary slavery in Virginia. But when Mason's text was put to a vote, the legislature added a qualification that men take possession of their rights “when they enter into a state of society,” thus eliminating slaves, who were not adjudged part of society. It later sharpened this point when it limited citizenship to “all white persons born within the territory of the commonwealth.” But then, remarkably, it reversed course somewhat a few years later to include black people as citizens if they were already free; it deleted “white” from the citizenship definition and declared that “all free persons” born in Virginia were citizens.
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