Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  The inevitable confrontation came in October 1819, a year after Hannah wrote her letter to Jefferson. One Saturday night Yancey took the measure of the weather, saw signs of frost, and resolved to get all hands into the field at first light to gather in the tobacco. But when Yancey got to the cabins in the morning, he found almost all the people gone: they had either headed into Lynchburg for market day, as was their custom, or, more likely, gone to the African Meeting House, as Hannah probably did. In any case, having Sunday off was an inalienable right for slaves; for six days their labor was taken, and the seventh was theirs.5

  Yancey ordered the hands he could find into the field. Later in the day another overseer saw Hannah and Billy coming back to the plantation and ordered them into the fields, but Billy “positively refused” and “a battle ensued.” With his mother looking on, Billy grabbed rocks in each hand and struck the overseer, who took several blows before he could pull away a rock and hit back. In the hand-to-hand fight Billy got the overseer to drop the rock by biting his hand, and then he fled.

  Here the account takes a surprising twist. Hannah went to Yancey and reported what Billy had done: “Hanah saw it all, and told me Billy had bitt and struck the overseer.” She may have thought that the only way to save her son was to bring him back into the good graces of the system. She may also have felt that she was the cause of the fight, that Billy’s anger had flared at seeing his mother ordered to work on the Sabbath, which to her would have been a grievous sin.

  Billy did not escape into the hills but went to Monticello to beg Jefferson’s forgiveness, stating his complaint that the people had been compelled to work on Sunday.6 Perhaps for the sake of the mother, Jefferson pardoned the ungovernable son. Yancey was disgusted. “What must be done?” he pointedly wrote to Jefferson. “They run from here to you, and from you to here, I know of only one remedy.” He did not specify what that remedy might be.

  Billy’s reprieve did not reform him. Three years later he attacked another overseer, slashing the man’s face about a dozen times. Once again, Hannah witnessed her son’s attack. She rushed to the overseer’s aid. As one of Jefferson’s relatives reported, “He would have bled to Death but…Hannah a Black woman who has the care of the House staunched the Blood by holding the wounds together till they sent for a Doctor.” In the preaching Hannah had heard at the African Meeting House, Moses kills the overseer and escapes to become the savior of the slaves; Hannah the cook found herself holding the overseer’s bloody face in her hands as if she could undo her son’s crime.7 At that moment her world collapsed.

  Billy fled for his life. Jeff Randolph put an announcement in the Richmond newspaper offering $50 for Billy’s capture under the headline “A Murderer Escaped.” The advertisement suggested that Billy might head to Richmond by a boat on the James River, or to Charlottesville, or to Washington. He was described as “a bright mulatto” about five feet six inches. Despite the severity of his wounds, the overseer survived the attack. In short order Billy was captured and remanded to trial in Bedford County.8 Billy was the only one who had wielded a weapon in the attack, but he and two other Poplar Forest slaves, Gawen and Hercules, were all charged with “wickedly and feloniously having consulted upon the subject of rebelling and making insurrection against the law and government.” It appears that the authorities suspected an uprising in the making.

  The outcome of the trial is surprising. All three men were acquitted of the conspiracy charge. And though Billy was found guilty of stabbing, he received a very lenient sentence. He was burned in the left hand and given thirty-nine lashes, the usual punishment for theft. Given the seriousness of the crime, the acquittals and the light punishment seem strange. That fall Bedford County had executed two slaves, but somehow this incident had a different outcome.

  Because of the gravity of the crime, the legal system promptly took notice of it, but the legal process might have proven costly to Thomas Jefferson. At that moment he happened to be in need of cash and wanted to sell these men. Had they been convicted of conspiring to rebel, a capital offense, they would have been hanged or transported. Since condemning slaves was legally the seizure of private property, the State of Virginia would have had to compensate Jefferson for the value of the convicted slaves, but at a much lower rate of compensation than what the open market would set.

  As required by law, the defendants had an attorney, hired by Jeff Randolph. The lawyer would have explained Jefferson’s position to the five gentlemen justices who sat in judgment at the court of “oyer and terminer”—the special state court that adjudicated crimes committed by slaves. Of the five judges, one was related to Jefferson by marriage and another had been on the Poplar Forest payroll as an overseer.9 It was a simple task to persuade such judges to release these men back to Jefferson’s custody. Within days, Billy, Gawen, Hercules, and another slave were “all four of them…chained together” and taken south to be sold by Joel Yancey and two other white men. Their destination was Louisiana, where Jefferson expected the highest price to be obtained. But the slave market was in a slump, no buyer could be found, and the men had to be hired out. Three of them soon died of disease, and Jefferson got nothing for them. Billy escaped from the plantation where he was hired out but was captured and jailed in New Orleans. What happened to him next, I could not find out.10

  After he had the four men sent on their lethal journey, Jefferson continued to visit their home place, sitting for meals prepared by Hannah, riding and walking through fields and forests. Poisoning techniques were well known around Poplar Forest, and the farm offered a choice of blunt and sharp instruments, yet the master rode serenely about. Revenge was unthinkable.

  The account of Hannah rushing to the aid of the stricken overseer is contained in an obscure letter written by Elizabeth Trist, who lived near Poplar Forest, to her grandson Nicholas, who was married to Jefferson’s granddaughter Virginia. Looking through her other letters in the hope of finding more information about Poplar Forest, I made one of those discoveries that radically shifts one’s perception of events. It is easy to characterize Billy as a villainous renegade, a bloody-minded resister against a system we have been told was benevolent. But Mrs. Trist wrote of Poplar Forest, “I fear the poor Negroes fare hard. I wish they were as well treated as Mr Tournillon’s are.”11 The Tournillon plantation was in Louisiana, where conditions for slaves were notoriously more brutal than in Virginia, yet she thought Mr. Jefferson’s Poplar Forest was worse.

  10

  “I Will Answer for Your Safety…Banish All Fear”

  The archives have their documents in abundance, but Monticello Mountain itself is one huge document: an earthen text bearing traces of uncountable stories and a past that stubbornly reasserts its mysteries. I arranged for a hike around the mountain with Monticello’s archaeologist Fraser Neiman. In a single day we crossed different zones of time and morality, encountering Jefferson young and old, along with relics of the many different people who lived here, working industriously, raising families, and entangling themselves in ambiguous dramas of crime, punishment, and deception.

  A dirt road led off the summit of the mountain to a low-slung building way out of the sight of visitors that looked more like some kind of repair shop than the headquarters of a high-tech archaeological team. Pickups and cars were parked in its graveled yard with various kinds of equipment scattered about. Inside, staff members shared a warren of offices and storage rooms where thousands of artifacts were warehoused and studied. Walls displayed maps, graphs, and photos with captions written in the jargon of archaeology—“protected depositional environments,” meaning “storage pits”; “secondary refuse aggregates,” or “garbage piles”; and “spatial auto-correlation,” meaning “nearby things should be similar.” Their high-flown jargon notwithstanding, the archaeology staff forms the down-and-dirty corps of the research process here. The high season for their work is also the high season for central Virginia’s heat and humidity, because it is in summer that Monticello can obtain st
udents to staff the digs. The only relief for the diggers comes when a visiting lecturer gives a talk in the refined, air-conditioned precincts of the Jefferson research library on another part of the estate. It is comical to see sweating, clay-smeared diggers, looking like lost explorers, troop into a conference room and take seats alongside the crisply dressed denizens of the archives.

  Some years earlier a small group of specialists had met in a conference room at the University of Virginia to hear Neiman talk about his recent findings. A self-confessed lover of “geeky” graphs, charts, and almost any compilation of numbers, Neiman offered a broad interpretation of African-American life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries based on his meticulous study of holes in the ground. He concluded, “Many Chesapeake slaves seem to have achieved modest gains in their living situations.” They could do something most of them had not been able to do before: they could live together as families. I asked Neiman if he would take me around the mountain and show me some of the sites that had led him to this conclusion.

  At his headquarters Neiman unrolled a map of Monticello Mountain on a worktable and ran his finger over it to outline our hike. Looking at the map, I realized how much more there is to “Monticello” than just the famous house on the summit. Jefferson intended the whole property to be a unified work of landscape art, modeled on the European idea of the ferme ornée, or ornamented farm. Neiman’s map, which noted more than a score of African-American settlements scattered around the mountain, was laid over Jefferson’s own plat of the mountain done in 1809. Jefferson had marked a few overseers’ houses, slave houses, and four “Roundabouts” in a network of scenic roads laid out for carriage rides and walks, which visitors and Jefferson’s family enjoyed enormously. The roundabouts took horse and carriage riders past landscape vistas and views of grazing animals and fields of crops. As his great-granddaughter recalled, “The woods around the mountainsides offered neverfailing enjoyments: to peep through the Park pales and watch the deer; to walk around the shady roundabouts.”1 These paths formed a delightful maze through the forest, through which Jefferson’s grandchildren could wander on a hot summer day until they reached a cool spring at the bottom of the hillside. Neiman said we would follow the Third Roundabout to an old work road that led to an archaeological site and then pick up another roundabout to get to the remnants of a slave house.

  Just a short walk from the offices Neiman paused in an open field and unrolled the map. “This is an area that we know Jefferson called the Ancient Field. This is probably the oldest cultivated piece of ground on the mountain.” Here topography connected with history. All of Jefferson’s fields lay on the southern side of the mountain except this one, which faces north. Three miles away stood Shadwell, the home of Jefferson’s parents, Peter and Jane, where Thomas was born in 1743, six years after his father had acquired four hundred acres here. Altogether, Peter owned about seventy-two hundred acres, with his seat at Shadwell, conveniently near the Rivanna River. An explorer, surveyor, and map-maker, Peter probably took note of the fertility of this land during one of his trips through the region. Experienced farmers, Neiman said, could judge the quality of a piece of wildland by the types of trees growing on it—poplars, for example, denote good soil with deep drainage—and he surmised that Peter Jefferson had selected this acreage by scouting the tree cover. He had his slaves cut a road in a straight line from a ford across the Rivanna River near Shadwell up to the Ancient Field, which the master could see from his house. One archaeological site we would soon pass was a small slave quarter dating to the 1740s that had been occupied by Peter’s slaves.

  Somewhat ruefully, Neiman pointed at a 1970s structure on the edge of the Ancient Field. It was built on top of a slave’s house. No one had investigated the site before putting the building there. “There’s an artifact scatter that extends through here,” he said, sweeping his arm toward the structure, which “unfortunately was built in the middle of it. We know from Jefferson’s surveys that by the early 1790s there were two slave houses here, one lived in by a man named Tom Shackelford, and another by a man named Phil, whose last name we don’t know. They were both wagon drivers. Tom’s house, we think, is pretty well preserved under this little mound here. Phil’s house has not fared as well.”

  After Neiman came to Monticello in 1995, he launched a detailed survey, digging test pits along a grid every forty feet to search for archaeological remains. By 2011, Monticello Mountain had some twenty thousand holes punched into it, a foot in diameter to the depth of the subsoil. As each pit was dug, the archaeologists sifted the dirt for artifacts with a dogged, inch-by-inch scrupulousness that gave them a slow but rich payoff; they found sites of occupation and work never known before.

  We set off again down the Third Roundabout, stopping briefly near a stand of cedar trees where crews had uncovered the stones of a cobble hearth, the remains of a log house occupied by Peter Jefferson’s slaves. “One of the maddening things,” Neiman said, “is that by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, log-building was the cheapest way to build. They just sit right on the surface of the ground.” And when log structures were removed or disintegrated, they left no foundation lines, so “we seldom get actual measurements of dimensions.” Thomas Jefferson settled slaves on this spot and at another place nearby in the 1770s when he took over Monticello and continued planting tobacco, as his father had done.

  Neiman unrolled one of the computer-generated charts he was so fond of. Seeing my quizzical gaze, he said, “Numbers, man—numbers are our friends.” He was showing me a distribution map of the ceramic shards they had found here. “So this is the white stoneware map. It was popular in the 1740s up to the Revolution, and you can see there’s a big concentration of it right up here on the north end of where we are.” He pointed to a pile of leaves atop black plastic sheets that covered an excavation. White stoneware was used by Peter Jefferson’s slaves, and sure enough Neiman’s chart indicated that as time passed and that type of stoneware fell from fashion, its occurrence here fell also. “There’s a little bit on the southern side, but that’s as it’s going out of fashion in the 1770s.”

  Warming to his task, Neiman produced more charts and maps. “So then we fast-forward to the creamware map. The creamware gets popular in the 1770s. This is showing us the slave and overseer settlement in the tobacco period.” His fingers darted from the charts to the clearing as he pointed out two distinct stylistic zones, with the fancier ceramics concentrated in one area. This was how the archaeology team figured out that slaves lived on the southern part of the site and someone of higher status lived where the finer shards were found. Then he played his trump card: when they consulted Jefferson’s map, they found an overseer’s house—“Boom! It comes out right on the edge of the site”—on the very spot where they’d found the costlier china.

  We headed farther down the road through the silence of the forest. Tourists are not allowed here, so we had Monticello Mountain to ourselves. For Jefferson, the forest was a speedway. He was a wild carriage driver, as a visitor, Margaret Bayard Smith, discovered during a harrowing ride on the roundabouts with Jefferson at the reins—like a middle-aged man at the wheel of a roadster—and his granddaughter Ellen wedged into the seat with them. Jefferson talked nonstop as he maneuvered around and over rocks and fallen trees at high speed. All this was fine as long as they were on relatively level ground, but when Jefferson turned to descend the mountain, Smith wrote, “fear took from me the power of listening to him…nor could I forbear expressing my alarm.” Jefferson tut-tutted her anxieties: “My dear madam, you are not to be afraid, or if you are you are not to show it; trust yourself implicitly to me, I will answer for your safety…banish all fear.” But Smith was so terrified as the carriage raced toward a rock that she jumped out, while Ellen sat frozen to the bench, in fear more of disappointing her grandfather than of the looming rock: “Poor Ellen did not dare get out.” Jefferson’s serene confidence was due to the presence of a slave on horseback who, as th
ey approached the rock, galloped ahead, leaped from his mount, and with great strength and skill braced the vehicle as it tilted ominously; otherwise, Smith said, “we must have all been rolled down the mountain.”2 It was the slave who answered for their safety.

  As we walked down the road, I could make out some movement in a clearing up ahead. About twenty people were at work scraping dirt, pushing wheelbarrows around, and taking notes and measurements. Every summer the Monticello staff is augmented by students in a field school run jointly with the University of Virginia. They had excavated two large, shallow rectangles, exposing some scattered rocks and bricks that did not seem to promise any great historical illumination.

  The earth of Monticello is the clay that has frustrated generations of Virginia farmers, and the two burnt-red excavations contrasted sharply with the grass in the clearing and the bright greenery of the surrounding forest. The archaeologists themselves seemed to have become part of this earth, as nearly all of them were smeared with clay and sweat. Dressed in khakis and a light shirt that looked resplendently clean among the mud-smeared tribe, Neiman stared intently at a blank patch of earth as if he could read it, and in fact he could. He was looking for slight differences in color that would indicate a disturbance in the earth, but it was not a good day for reading this particular patch of dirt: “At the moment it’s partially baked out and dried out, so you can’t really see the differences as well.”

  Two hundred years earlier this forest had been a wheat field, and ten years before that a cluster of slave houses had stood here. A few yards away a small group of archaeologists worked at the spot of another house; the remains of yet other houses might lie somewhere beyond the clearing, which had the unprepossessing name “Site 8.” This clearing turned out to be a hot spot for artifacts—mainly ceramics, nails, glass, and bricks but also buttons, coins, tools, and utensils—so the team focused its efforts here.