The story of Black Sal and her children, of Hannibal and Patt and their children, does not quite fit into our “blood-cemented” fabric. When Jefferson’s biographer Henry Randall summoned the memory of “woes unutterable” and called for “groans, and tears,” he did not have these people in mind. Their humanity cries out, but they ran to the wrong flag. We can only imagine the desperation and the hope of these parents who took their small children to a military camp on the move. It is a mark of their despair at what they thought the future would otherwise hold; they were fleeing a dead zone where the Declaration of Independence cast no light, and they never made it onto the ships.
When Randall evoked groans and tears, he surely had in mind a passage in Jefferson’s papers:
When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality.4
Jefferson was writing about the travail of the slaves, and in his entire canon there is nothing more moving than this passage. From the date when he wrote it, June 1786, until Lincoln’s second inaugural address, no American leader so powerfully condemned the American enterprise for violating God’s justice. Jefferson possessed a sharp sensitivity to injustice and inequity. Massive social disparity appalled him. He recoiled at the vision of a world without justice, ruled solely by power, in which “every man…must be either the hammer or the anvil,” of society divided in two, with a gilded class resembling “god and his angels in splendor” lording over “crouds of the damned trampled under their feet…suffering under physical and moral oppression.”*5
Few biographical tasks are more frustrating than trying to assemble a montage of quotations from Jefferson’s written work that make sense of his stance on slavery. Among the completely contradictory points he advanced about slaves and slavery, we have: the institution was evil; blacks had natural rights, and slavery abrogated those rights; emancipation was desirable; emancipation was imminent; emancipation was impossible until a way could be found to exile the freed slaves; emancipation was impossible because slaves were incompetent; emancipation was just over the horizon but could not take place until the minds of white people were “ripened” for it.
Laid end to end, his utterances present a rolling paradox of contradictions that inspire his detractors to call him a hypocrite, his defenders to call him compartmentalized, and baffled onlookers to call him “human.” In Joseph Ellis’s well-known observation, “He had the kind of duplicity possible only in the pure of heart.” Ellis argues that Jefferson possessed, and in some ways was victimized by, “daunting powers of self-deception,” defends him against the charge of lying, and does not see evidence of a conflicted soul or guilty conscience that others have detected. John Chester Miller finds a “harrowing sense of guilt.” Fawn Brodie writes, “Still, there was guilt,” and suggests that Jefferson urgently examined his conscience, conducting “scrutinies into the heart of man.”6
Jefferson appears out of focus because he was not static; we are seeing a process unfolding. There was the young man, heir to the slave system, who planned a common cemetery for blacks and whites with a monument that condemned his own mastery. There was the fiery revolutionary who denounced the “execrable commerce” of the slave trade, declared that Africans possessed natural rights, and then in 1785 sold thirty-one slaves to keep his creditors at bay. During the post-Revolutionary decade, from 1783 to the early 1790s, Jefferson’s misgivings over slavery seem to fade. Blacks still have rights, but the prospect of their emancipation recedes. The “scrutinies” involve not only the heart but also the microeconomics of slavery at Monticello and the macroeconomics of slavery in the emerging nation. The young, unmarried idealist, the disgusted heir of slavery, ages into the father worried over making “provision for my children” and enlarging “that capital which a growing family had a right to expect.”7 He is a man holding a crystal ball in which he simultaneously sees a golden future and a moral abyss, and is thus confronted with a choice.
Jefferson’s process mirrored the one taking place in the whole country, so this span of years from the 1780s into the 1790s is crucial. Given the ideals of the Revolution, it was difficult to admit that slavery had a place in the new nation. The racial integration of George Washington’s army had raised hopes for a general emancipation of black slaves. Under pressure from extreme progressives—notably the Quakers—the Virginia legislature in 1782 had passed a remarkable law allowing individuals to free slaves, but it stopped short of mandating a general emancipation. Then, as tobacco cultivation faltered in eastern Virginia, it boomed in southern Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. “The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands, and will fill that country with slaves,” George Mason declared during the Constitutional Convention.8
Revered as the chief spokesman of liberty, Jefferson received many appeals from abolitionists foreign and domestic to explain and expunge the contradictions. When the British abolitionist Richard Price, a Unitarian minister, arranged to have a pamphlet on emancipation hand-delivered to South Carolina’s Speaker of the House, he was told that the Speaker “thought himself almost affronted by having the pamphlet presented to him.”9 To whom did Price turn for an explanation of this blatant betrayal of American ideals? To Jefferson, of course. Price wrote, “I have made myself ridiculous by Speaking of the American Revolution in the manner I have done; it will appear that the people who have been Struggling so earnestly to save themselves from Slavery are very ready to enslave others; the friends of liberty and humanity in Europe will be mortify’d, and an event which had raised their hopes will prove only an introduction to a new Scene of aristocratic tyranny and human debasement.”
Jefferson admitted that the new nation presented the “interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression,” but he raised hope for the future. He told Price that “the sacred side” in the conflict over slavery was “gaining daily recruits from the influx into office of young men.”10 This was one of a series of responses he composed in the 1780s to defend himself and his country for America’s inexplicable delay in ending injustice. To borrow from Joseph Ellis, there is duplicity here and a strange species of purity, because it was vital to Jefferson that he make everything America did seem good.
The lives of Flora and Quomina put a human face on the woes suffered by slaves during the Revolution. They also put a human face on aspects of slavery often omitted from discussions of the Founders but very much on Jefferson’s mind. The fate of these girls is known because they were assets that Jefferson listed in his Farm Book, along with the names of the rest of Monticello’s war dead, as lost property. That crowded corner of the ledger page has a blank feel to it, empty of any remark on the human travail it records. On this page the people are listed not as freedom seekers but as absconded assets, and Jefferson pressured the British government for reparations.
It is still said that slavery was a dying, unprofitable institution after the Revolution, although the historian Robert McColley debunked that myth in the 1970s. The myth remains useful because it averts attention from the fact that slavery was extremely profitable—so profitable in so many ways that, as McColley demonstrated, it was not dying but expanding, well before the cotton boom. Then as now, no one liked to admit that questions of “sacred” human rights are determined by financial considerations.
And without the financial factor, Jefferson’s protest against Britain’s mass evacuation of freed slaves seems inexplicable, given that the British precisely fulfilled the wish he expressed in Notes that African-Americans be colonized to distant places beyond the reach of mixture. If Notes is to be believed, the king’s generals had done America, and Jefferson himself, a huge favor.11
But Flora and Quomina, young
as they were, owed Jefferson money. In his legal writings he referred to “a debt contracted from the infant to the master.”12 All unknowing, the girls contracted this debt through their mother, as did every enslaved child through every enslaved mother: “being the property of the master, it is impossible she [a slave mother] should maintain it [her child] but with her master’s goods.” This formula was universally recognized by slaveholders.* Slaves came into this world, and into the consciousness of their masters, not only as property but in a debtor relationship, as if they had a contract. Every time a child was born into slavery, a debt was incurred. Their relationship to the master was not just as brute laborers but as shadow players in the economic landscape, quasi-people who could incur obligations, duty-bound to pay for their own upkeep.
This way of thinking put a legal footing under perpetual slavery, as if there existed a contract between Jefferson and his family, on the one hand, and their slaves, on the other. The slaves formed the critical mass of the capital his family had a “right” to expect. Thus redefining his relationship to his slaves, he moved it away from “slavery,” which was loathsome to him because it was a theft of their rights, and toward a framework he felt comfortable with, a framework formed by legalisms of debt and reciprocal obligation, which acknowledged in theory (at least to his satisfaction) the rights of his slaves. Their rights were not abrogated, merely suspended. By being born at Monticello, slaves became part of the legacy that Jefferson’s children had a right to expect. In this decade of Jefferson’s decision-making, thirty-five girls were born into indebtedness at Monticello.
His dealings with Monticello’s slaves express an idea of reciprocity. One of his most important terms is “happiness” (familiar from the Declaration of Independence), both his and the slaves’. He writes, “I have my house to build, my feilds to farm, and to watch for the happiness of those who labor for mine.”13 For his part, he is obligated to act as benefactor of the slaves. He stated to his plantation manager without a trace of irony: “I am governed solely by views to their happiness.” He never explained the existence of this contract to his slaves, but he expected they would perceive its effect and be inspired to reciprocate his benefactions with diligence and loyalty. Those who did not act according to the unspoken contract could be punished.
Jefferson’s sense of his slaves’ obligation to him was sharpened by what the British did to him when the Revolution ended, when he and his fellow Virginia planters confronted once more the debts they owed to British merchants from before the war. Their grace period was over, and it had not really been a grace period after all. They were shocked to learn that their creditors had added interest during the war. Freed from Great Britain politically, they became enslaved financially. “These debts had become hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London,” he wrote.14 When Jefferson was living in Paris as U.S. minister plenipotentiary in 1784–89, he sought some way out from the debts that he and his countrymen owed.
Jefferson’s British creditors were pressing hard for payment of a debt that had been passed to him from the estate of his wife’s father, John Wayles. In negotiations with his creditors in 1786, Jefferson raised the issue of Flora, Quomina, and the other dead souls, claiming that the slaves and other property he had lost “would have paid your debt, principal and interest.”15 It is not quite proper to say that Jefferson could “lie,” but here he was twisting the truth. He claimed a loss of thirty slaves, though by his own count he had lost eighteen. (Some returned to Monticello, and later he sold or gave away at least five of those.) He questioned Cornwallis’s motives, saying that the general “would have done right” if his intention had been “to give them freedom”—in fact, that was Cornwallis’s intention. It is worth noting that during the war Governor Jefferson never proposed freeing African-Americans who would agree to bear arms for the United States.
Coldly making the case for what we would call a wrongful-death claim, Jefferson accused Cornwallis of intentionally planning “to consign them to inevitable death from the small pox and putrid fever then raging in his camp.” In any humane calculation the melancholy deaths of the families who fled to freedom can only be called an accident of war, and if anyone had fault, it was Jefferson. But he passed blame to the British for his own failure to inoculate his slaves against smallpox, as Washington had done. Jefferson’s pleas left his creditors unmoved.*16
Tossing in Paris “on a bed of thorns,” haunted in his sleep by the nightmarish face of the debt collector, he has a liberating revelation: it is the slaves who are responsible for the debt. It is not his fault. The laborers in the ground must compensate him by making greater exertions than ever before—they must work harder, very much harder.17
In July 1787 he writes to his manager at Monticello:
I cannot decide to sell my lands. I have sold too much of them already, and they are the only sure provision for my children, nor would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labor. In this I am governed solely by views to their happiness which will render it worth their while to use extraordinary exertions for some time to enable me to…
At this point one expects that Jefferson will write “set them free.” But he writes: “put them ultimately on an easier footing,† which I will do the moment they have paid the debts due from the estate, two thirds of which have been contracted by purchasing them.”18
His slaves in fact had nothing to do with this debt, so it is hard to put a properly descriptive word to this final sentence, which is a turning point in Jefferson’s embrace of slavery. One could call it a lie, or an evasion, or a delusion. In any event, it is completely untrue, and Jefferson knew it to be untrue because he was immersed in the legalities of that debt.19 His father-in-law had taken a speculative plunge into the slave market and lost his shirt to a crowd of rich Virginia planters.
Wayles was “one of those wholesale chaps,” as an aristocratic planter described the traders, middlemen, and debt collectors who flocked to the slave trade when the market rose. He and a partner had brokered the sale of a consignment of slaves arriving aboard the Prince of Wales in 1772. The shrinkage of inventory en route was 30 percent—only 280 people out of 400 survived the passage, and of these Wayles and his partner sold 266.20 But when Wayles tried to collect payment from his wealthy customers, they were “not at home.” The tobacco market had collapsed; the planters had no ready cash; and in any case they were accustomed to evading bills tendered by the lower sort of chap. So Wayles and his partner were on the hook to their London agents for the total payment for the shipload of people. Jefferson got stuck with the bill when he inherited the Wayles estate in 1773.21
The phrase “blaming the victim” is a modern coinage, but it approximates the frame of mind Jefferson constructed. The slaves Jefferson inherited from Wayles were not the people who had been imported for sale. They were Virginia-born people, but because they were black, he considered that they bore a communal responsibility for the debt Wayles had incurred by trading in black people. Jefferson’s letter to his manager shows a deft, magical shifting of blame away from himself, from his father-in-law, from the planters, from the big traders in London—all of whom had bet on the market and lost. Ensnared in obligations by a market so deranged that money had become, Jefferson said, “like oak leaves,” he blames the slaves—their situation is their own fault, and they are obliged to pay off my debt because I am the victim.22 His laborers became harnessed to a virtuous undertaking; they would save him; and their obligation for his debts quieted his moral conflicts.
5
The Bancroft Paradox
Slavery followed Jefferson abroad. Sent by Congress to France in 1784 as minister plenipotentiary to forge “a powerful link of commercial connexion” between the United States and France, Jefferson carried in his head a vital statistic: more than one-third of all U.S. exports consisted of tobacco. He estim
ated the total annual value of American exports at $80 million, and of this “thirty [million dollars] are constituted by the single article of tobacco.”1 Not far behind tobacco was rice. Both crops were raised and harvested mainly by slaves.
Without the French fleet, French troops, and French loans, the United States might well have lost the War of Independence. France now held the key to the financial survival of the fledgling republic, locked in a commercial struggle with Great Britain. So Jefferson appealed to the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, stating his hope that “the whole of this [the tobacco crop] be brought into the ports of France” to overcome the “serious obstacle [of] our debt to Great Britain.” With the proceeds of tobacco and rice sales to France, American planters could make payments on their British debts. Furthermore, importing French products for sale in the United States would stimulate the American economy, allowing the British debt to be paid off entirely.2
Jefferson’s personal predicament at Monticello mirrored the national predicament. He wrote letters to the foreign minister and to his manager at Monticello in the same week, and the messages were essentially the same; in both the micro- and the macroeconomies, the slaves would be harnessed indefinitely to the task of paying off British debt.*
Jefferson found himself in an extremely awkward position in his dealings with the French government on this issue. The representative of a weak new nation, he could gain access to royal officials only through the intervention of America’s friends at court, and all of them were abolitionists. Like his predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson took up a public-relations campaign to persuade our most valued foreign partner that his newly fledged nation did not have a human-rights problem.
The “Americanists” at the French court believed in the ideals of the Revolution and its extraordinary promise for the future of humanity, and they expected Jefferson to do something to end slavery. These were men who had marshaled military and financial backing for the American Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette is the one best remembered today; other supporters were the Marquis de Condorcet, the Marquis de Chastellux (who had visited Monticello in 1782), and the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (who translated the U.S. Constitution into French). Lafayette and Chastellux had crossed the ocean to risk their lives for the American cause, the former as a general in the Continental army, the latter as an officer in the French expeditionary force. Now that independence had been won but slavery remained, they wondered what they had fought for.
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 8