Jefferson’s salary as president should have been enough to help put him on the road to financial security. Despite this, he retired to Monticello in even more dire financial straits than when he had taken office, stunned by the new debts accrued in eight years. The way he conducted the business of the presidency was the heart of the problem. He spent lavishly, out of his own pocket, on the much storied dinner parties—or “campaigns,” as he called them—that he hosted for members of Congress and other government officials. This was not frivolity. These affairs had a serious public purpose for Jefferson and were critical to the way he governed. There he presided over a roundtable, eschewing waiters, serving the food to his guests himself, “being mother,” as it was called.5 The exquisite wine and choice French fare and his casual manner displayed in this intimate setting were central to his plan to build the Republican Party as a bulwark against Federalism that would outlast his tenure in office. The development of the United States along the lines he thought preferable was Jefferson’s true obsession. It operated to the detriment of any real consideration of ending slavery in the country or at Monticello. It even operated to the detriment of his legal white family. Much as he spoke of his family as the center of his universe, he, like many public men before and after him, arranged his life so that he spent large amounts of time away from his family doing what he thought was the real business of his life. Not only did his family lose time with him; his only surviving legal daughter, Martha, still with school-age children, would end up without her own home—the object of pity and charity.
How much the enslaved people closest to Jefferson, like Sally Hemings and Burwell Colbert, who were with him when no one else was around, knew of his financial circumstances upon his return to the mountain and in the years that followed will remain unknown. Though he may never have confided in either, a worried look or furrowed brow can communicate volumes. Even the free whites and unfree blacks who were not intimately involved with him could sense the precarious state of his finances, without knowing the full extent. Conversations overheard, strained silence at the mention of certain topics, bills delivered from persistent and familiar commercial outfits, can send messages almost as explicit as those directly conveyed.
The enslaved at Monticello, portrayed in early Jefferson scholarship as childlike and simpleminded, were anything but that. One has only to read the memoirs of men like Isaac Jefferson and Israel Gillette, with their dead-on observations about the financial states, family relationships, and histories of the whites in their world, to know that they were not. They could never have afforded to ignore any visible signs of turmoil. Knowing white slave owners was their business, for their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, were in the hands of these fallible people, who could be expected to put the interests of the enslaved last when and if things began to fall apart.
The sale of Jefferson’s personal library was a major indication that all was not right in the Monticello household. While it was, without question, a great thing for the country, the seed of the magnificent institution that we know today, anyone at all familiar with Jefferson knew how deeply he loved his books, collected over the four decades after the fire at Shadwell destroyed his first library. Isaac Jefferson saw Jefferson’s library as central to his persona. One of his most vividly expressed memories of Jefferson was as the man whose “mighty head” was full of information gleaned from the books strewn about his room, eager to consult them when asked a question he did not know the answer to. Seeing Jefferson’s books, the source of his strength, packed away in crates and loaded onto wagons moving down Monticello’s roundabouts was like seeing Samson’s shorn locks upon the floor. That effect did not last, however, for, as he famously proclaimed, Jefferson could “not live without books.” Not long after he said goodbye to one library, he began to build another.6
There were indeed other mixed signals at Monticello as Jefferson continued to live outwardly as if he had no serious money problems. The economic fallout from the War of 1812 and poor harvests plagued him during the first ten years of his retirement. The horde of visitors, who it can truly be said helped eat him out of house and home, made matters worse. Sometimes as many as a dozen uninvited guests would show up to dine and stay with him. Jefferson might have been able to avert final ruin had he sold his slaves and a good portion of his land and retreated to his home at Poplar Forest to adopt a much less lavish lifestyle. Monticello was not a prosperous farm. Many of the enslaved people there worked on his building projects instead of in the fields. The large numbers of household servants—all Hemingses—were not making products that could be sold. In fact, as things careered out of control, members of his white family floated to him the idea of a move to Poplar Forest. It was far too late for that. In 1819 land prices collapsed, and the sale of his property, real and human, would not have saved him. Virginia’s economy did not begin to rebound until the 1830s, years after his death.7
Jefferson would never even have considered so drastic a course between 1809 and the 1820s, because he would have seen no need for it. Along with his preference for discovering income-producing activities over drastically cutting expenses, he also embarked upon another surefire losing financial strategy during his retirement: borrowing money to pay off other loans. Any modern-day observer doing the same with multiple credit cards will immediately recognize the morass Jefferson had entered. This was not only a bad practice on its face. It obligated Jefferson to the man who helped him get the bulk of the loans, Wilson Cary Nicholas. This unfortunate relationship really sealed Jefferson’s fate, and the fates of nearly 150 people—Hemingses among them—whose lives would be thrown into utter turmoil and despair because of what happened between Jefferson and Nicholas.
Nicholas, a governor of Virginia between 1814 and 1816, was the president of the Richmond branch of the Bank of the United States. His brother was the president of the Farmer’s Bank. They were the sons of Robert Carter Nicholas, who had been an associate of John Wayles and whom Jefferson had known for many years. With Wilson Nicholas’s help, Jefferson secured hefty loans during the first decade of his retirement from both Nicholas brothers’ banks. Wilson Nicholas was also “family,” the father-in-law of Jefferson’s grandson Jeff Randolph. There is no question that Nicholas helped Jefferson secure the loans on easy terms because of their family connection. But in 1818 it was Jefferson’s turn. Nicholas asked him to cosign two $10,000 notes from the Bank of the United States. From today’s perspective it appears absurd for Nicholas to have sought the endorsement of a man he knew from personal experience had no money and was living life on credit. It was, of course, Nicholas’s knowledge that the Jefferson name carried weight that made him ask for this favor.8
Although Jefferson hesitated over Nicholas’s request—he really did not want to sign the notes—he felt he could not refuse his friend and his grandson’s father-in-law, especially since Nicholas had been solicitous toward him. It turned out to have been one of the single worst mistakes of Jefferson’s life, for him and for those enslaved on his plantations. While on a visit to Poplar Forest, he heard the baleful news. Nicholas was in default. He assured Jefferson that he would be protected, saying that he would never forgive himself if his friend suffered because of his failure. Nicholas’s promise to feel bad if Jefferson was hurt because of him surely provided small consolation, given that if he was wrong about his ability to protect Jefferson, the already financially imperiled former president would have $20,000 plus interest added to his indebtedness. As it happened, Nicholas could not protect Jefferson: he lost everything in the Panic of 1819 and died while visiting his daughter and son-in-law at Tufton, one of Jefferson’s quarter farms. Jefferson thus became liable for the $20,000.9
As Herbert Sloan has pointed out, it was not just the $20,000 that was the “coup de grace,” as Jefferson put it, but the interest on the debt, some $1,200 a year that Jefferson had to pay the Bank of the United States, money that he simply did not have. This fiasco could not have remained hidden from t
hose enslaved at Monticello, for it was the kind of thing people gossiped about. What could cause more talk than the spectacle of a former governor of Virginia, the president of a bank, losing everything in a financial tidal wave along with other, ordinary people? If there was ever any notion that Jefferson might free his slaves, that chance was more than lost after this debacle.
The fact is there really is no reason to suppose that Jefferson would have freed his slaves even if he could have. In the first place, doing so would have deprived his daughter and grandchildren of property, something he would never do, particularly since his son-in-law was in even more desperate straits than he. He had been taking care of Martha Randolph and her family for most of her married life. Jefferson always suffers in comparison with Washington on the question of emancipating slaves, but the differences between the two men’s situations are obvious and stark. Washington had no legal biological white children, and his stepchildren were part of a family that was extremely wealthy in its own right. Inheritance is a central component of private property regimes, and for many people the right to leave property to one’s offspring is the whole point of having property. The right to inherit creates expectations of its own, and George Washington would have had to be willing to disappoint the expectations of a George Washington Jr. and a set of siblings—not to mention their mother—if such offspring had existed. Recall the young Martha Randolph’s great frustration with her father-in-law’s decision to remarry and start a new family. That marriage took property away from her husband and, by extension, from her own children.
The first president, who actually dithered about emancipating his slaves up until the last moment, died in 1799, when Virginia’s economic climate was far better than it was in the 1820s, when Jefferson died.10 Moreover, traces of the fallout from the American Revolution were still influencing attitudes about emancipation. The combination of the revolt on Saint Domingue, which happened before Washington’s death, and Gabriel’s rebellion, which occurred after it, changed the atmosphere in Virginia significantly. The post-Revolutionary enthusiasm for the rights of man that had created a critique of slavery had long faded by the 1820s, and Jefferson’s Virginia was already well on its way toward a full embrace of proslavery ideology. Jefferson discerned early on in his career that, no matter what some members of his society said about the evils of slavery, a legislative abolition of the institution in Virginia, and in the South as a whole, was as close to a political impossibility as anything could be. Accepting that reality, he set his sights on things that he could actually accomplish.
Most important of all, however, is that Jefferson really had made his personal peace with slavery by the time of his retirement, and much of what he experienced in the final phase of his life only reinforced his sense of complacency. Even as the extension of easy credit from the Richmond and Washington banks allowed him to maintain his lifestyle with no serious thought of making drastic changes, his closest relationships with enslaved people on the mountain worked to similar effect. The Hemingses, of course, cannot be considered, in modern parlance, “enablers,” in the manner of the banks, for Jefferson controlled their lives. Still, the way he constructed his life with them did allow him to avoid facing the basic realities of slavery.
It is more common to think about Jefferson and slavery in intellectual terms, what he tried to do about it as a young man in the House of Burgesses and what he said about it in the excised portions of the Declaration of Independence, in the Notes on the State of Virginia, and in his various letters over the years. Slavery, however, had an emotional salience in Jefferson’s life that far outstripped its meaning as an intellectual topic for discussion, or even as a political issue. When that is understood, much that seems perplexing and exasperating about him—that he said one thing on the subject but did something else—becomes totally comprehensible, if no less exasperating.
We can discover slavery’s ultimate meaning for Jefferson only by examining intensely the nature of his relations with the people whom he enslaved and by considering what those relationships meant in his day-to-day life. Rather than being a necessary evil or a problem to be solved, a thing to feel tortured about, slavery—as Jefferson lived it with the Hemingses, in particular—provided him with constant reinforcing positive benefits. We see this most clearly in his retirement, the longest period of his continuous residence at Monticello and, not coincidentally, the very period that many consider to mark the nadir of his expressed attitudes about slavery.
Jefferson had returned to Monticello at the age of sixty-six, not an age associated with making dramatic changes in one’s personal life. His longing for home had been a longing for stability, familiarity, and peace. There was surely a sense of vulnerability and a need to be cared for as he approached his declining years. He characteristically was able to escape thoughts of his financial worries by burying himself in a positive project: building the University of Virginia, an idée fixe that sustained him through his most despairing moments. He was happy when his grandson Jeff became more involved in helping him manage his farms, and greatly relieved when he was able to turn the whole business over to the younger man. What was left, and what he helped to perpetuate at Monticello during the final seventeen years of his life, were circumstances perfectly suited to his personality and most deeply felt needs.
There was his white family, Tom Randolph’s failure having brought his daughter Martha and her children back into his domestic fold. But slavery provided him with other things that were great comforts. It gave him a beautiful younger mistress and children, who could be shaped into some version of his private self—woodworker, musician, and sometime gardener. It provided him with a steady companion in Burwell Colbert, whom he styled as a “friend,” who acted as if he genuinely cared for Jefferson and whom Jefferson cared for in return. It gave him artisans whom he could be among and whose work he admired. Jefferson could monopolize all these people’s time, talents, and attention to his heart’s content, which he could not do with the whites in his life.
Consider first his artisans and the workers with whom he was in close contact. Joseph Fossett and John Hemings, in particular, headed the shops that were doing the kind of work that most interested Jefferson. Wormley Hughes was in charge of Jefferson’s gardens. What Susan Stein has called “the collaboration” between Hemings and Jefferson intensified between 1809 and 1826, as Hemings worked both at Monticello and at Poplar Forest.11 Jefferson was not a passive bystander, an owner/employer who issued orders and then stood back. He involved himself in Hemings’s work because he cared about the outcome and, as a woodworker himself, was deeply interested in the process. That Hemings had charge of Jefferson’s three sons also made their relationship deeper and more complex. There is no reason to doubt that part of John Hemings’s apparently intense loyalty to Jefferson stemmed from the fact that Jefferson had entrusted to him his sons, who were also Hemings’s nephews. This intersection of bloodlines and slavery, and the way Jefferson chose to handle the intersection, was just one more way that slavery distorted human relations.
Jefferson’s engagement with Joseph Fossett during his retirement was not as personally intense as his engagement with Hemings. He did make keys and locks, a simpler version of the metalworking that Fossett did in his blacksmith shop, but building things was by far Jefferson’s favored activity. The evidence regarding Fossett’s feelings about Jefferson is more ambiguous. He did, after all, run away during Jefferson’s presidency, and we cannot know certainly that he intended only to go to Washington to see his wife and then return to Monticello. At that point Jefferson clearly did not have the confidence that Fossett would return. That is why he took immediate steps to have him apprehended and brought home. Making Fossett the head of the blacksmith shop a year later, giving him a percentage of the profits earned there, and allowing him to work on his own time and keep the money he earned were Jefferson’s ways of making Fossett more “comfortable” in his enslavement and Jefferson more “comfortable” owning him.
Wormley Hughes was twenty-eight years old when Jefferson retired. He had served many roles at Monticello, including working in the nailery and on several of Jefferson’s building projects. After Jupiter Evans’s death, he took charge of Jefferson’s stables, a task that he enjoyed because he loved horses. By the time of Jefferson’s retirement, he was the head gardener at Monticello, apparently having learned his craft from Robert Bailey, the man who had lived next door to his grandmother for a time. Hughes thus had charge over two things Jefferson loved: horses and his gardens. Jefferson kept a Garden Book from 1766 until 1824, when his health began to fail drastically. The bulk of the entries note the day various plants bloomed, when various fruits and vegetables came to the table, and what types and quantities of plants others, enslaved people, planted. In his retirement he became more personally involved in the activity, famously writing in 1811. “[T]ho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener.” Jefferson would sometimes come out in the evenings and work in the garden Hughes tended, no doubt encountering the younger man and talking about the whole operation. The two men laid out flower beds on Monticello’s west lawn and worked closely enough together that Jefferson recommended that he be given his freedom.12
Burwell Colbert and Sally Hemings occupied similar places in Jefferson’s life. They had to work together as a team in order to deal effectively with Jefferson, particularly as he grew older. Both were familiar touchstones as the years advanced. Colbert, who was only ten years younger than his aunt Sally, named a daughter after her. Both Hemings and Colbert had come into Jefferson’s personal orbit when they were young and impressionable people who could be molded into the kind of companions that he wanted to have. They belonged to his closely guarded intimate world, though Colbert had a decidedly more public face as Jefferson’s manservant. Wherever Jefferson went during his retirement—to Poplar Forest, to Madison’s Montpelier, to the homes of other friends—Colbert went, too. Hemings’s place in Jefferson’s life was more resolutely private and contained, not at all the kind of thing that either he or his white family would have referred to. Acting as a substitute for a wife, sleeping with Jefferson, and having his children created the ultimate form of intimacy between the two over a very long period of time. Certainly by the time of his retirement, Hemings and Jefferson had a long history together and were well used to one another’s ways.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 79