When the archaeologists looked at Jefferson’s papers, they found that this was the very spot where Jefferson had first intended to put his burying ground—“one half to the use of my own family; the other of strangers, servants.” The white Jeffersons and Randolphs ended up atop the mountain, and the slaves here.
As we were leaving the graveyard, the last stop on our trek across the mountain, I turned and saw a bouquet of flowers lying on the ground. That day, someone unknown had come and placed that remembrance here; perhaps somewhere off the mountain lived a descendant who had neither forgotten nor abandoned this place.
I asked Neiman if he thought Betty Hemings and her family might be buried here, and his answer was that the Hemingses were more likely to have been buried closer to the summit. A sign of this appeared in the 1950s in the most startling manner. Monticello’s then director, James Bear, was walking in the area of the Ancient Field when, amazingly, he came upon a headstone from the 1830s wedged in the crook of a tree. How it got there nobody knows. One surmise is that an employee found it on the ground, put it in the tree for safekeeping, and never said a word about it. A marked headstone for a slave is very rare. Slave cemeteries are also rarely found. Indeed, given the size of the population of enslaved people—in Jefferson’s time 40 percent of Virginians were slaves—so few of their cemeteries have been found that one would think that slaves never died.
The holes on the mountainside suggested an improvement in family life; the large root cellar suggested food in abundance. It has long been known that slaves raised their own crops for sale, but only recently have we begun to get an idea of the scale of this enterprise and what it means. In 1994 a Jefferson expert at the Library of Congress, Gerard W. Gawalt, published a transcription of four years of crop accounts.27 From 1805 to 1808, Jefferson’s granddaughter Anne Cary Randolph met with slaves each Sunday during the summer months and bought a wide variety of goods from them. Anne was just fourteen years old when she started the record. Conducting business transactions with slaves formed part of a young white woman’s “apprenticeship” as a plantation mistress, according to Gawalt. Anne kept her records in a disused notebook of her grandfather’s, his account book from his days as a Williamsburg lawyer in the late 1760s. Anne’s grandmother Martha, Jefferson’s wife, had used the same notebook for the same purpose. Gawalt wrote that the records reveal the “vitality” of the “entrepreneurial spirit of the slaves.”
It required a farmer to find a deeper meaning in these farm records. In 2006, Monticello hired Leni Sorensen as its African-American research historian, someone with a Ph.D. in history who had also farmed in South Dakota. When she examined these crop accounts, she was struck by the “prolific” productivity of enslaved people who were obviously very skilled gardeners. Focusing on one month of late-summer records from August and September 1805, Sorensen noted an “impressive” sale of vegetables to the big house, including watermelons, cabbages, potatoes, cucumbers, and squashes, but an even more remarkable output of 47 dozen eggs and 117 chickens. With the eye of an experienced farmer, Sorensen knew that so many eggs and chickens do not simply wander onto the property: “In order to ensure a steady supply, the chicken-raisers among the slave community had to build and maintain nest boxes, food and water containers, brooding cages, and fenced chicken yards.” Someone had to guard the chickens against snakes, opossums, raccoons, stray dogs, and cats. This was a very large enterprise, and it would have involved virtually everyone in Monticello’s African-American community: “More than half the black adults at Monticello sold produce to the Jefferson household, and all but three adults among them also sold chickens. In fact, it is likely that all adult slaves at Monticello kept personal gardens, but that only those individuals who sold produce had occasion to appear in the records.”
At first glance this presents a heartening picture of go-getting and thrift, but other numbers tell us that if the slaves had not raised their own food, they would have starved. Jefferson’s rations were meager, and Sorensen calculated that the daily calorie payoff fell catastrophically short of what a working adult needed to survive. Bagwell and Minerva Granger, for example, with their five children, received a ration of sixteen dried herring and two pounds of beef—for a month. A modern American family of seven would consume that in three days, if the children could be persuaded to eat the herring. Pregnant and nursing women, who had to work in the fields despite their conditions and the demands on them, had special dietary needs that the Jeffersonian ration did not meet. Jefferson issued a white overseer six hundred pounds of pork a year, which is more than eleven pounds a week.28
For the slaves, it was plant or die, with the gardening and chicken-raising work done in the scant free time available to them in their dawn-to-dusk daily routine. Small children and the elderly had to do a lot of the work, when Jefferson did not call up the children and the “senile corps” to work for him. For the elderly, indeed, gardens were utterly essential: when slaves became too feeble to work all the time, Jefferson cut their rations in half. From time to time, one hears the rumor that planters turned old people out to the woods to die. Cutting an elderly person’s rations in half comes close to that.
Obscure and long-forgotten, Anne Randolph’s farm accounts utterly demolish one of the pillars of her grandfather’s racial ideology—that African-Americans were incapable of planning beyond sunset. He wrote in 1814: “For men probably of any color, but of this color we know, brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young.”29
At the time when his granddaughter was buying huge amounts of food for Jefferson’s table from the slaves—and Jefferson the gourmand always knew precisely where his food was coming from—he wrote another letter claiming that his burden of supporting slaves was “dayly increasing.”30
11
“To Serve You Faithful”
The recollections of the former Monticello slave Peter Fossett, from which I drew the opening of this book, contain a confusing passage: “My grandmother was free, and I remember the first suit she gave me. It was of blue nankeen cloth, red morocco hat and red morocco shoes. To complete this unique costume, my father added a silver watch.” Though almost anything is possible in the slavery universe, I could not quite understand how Fossett could have had a grandmother who was free, nor did it seem plausible that a slave boy at Monticello sported a fancy suit and a silver watch given to him by a father who was a slave.
But perhaps Fossett was telling the truth. His parents were two of the most important people on the mountain. His father, Joseph, became Monticello’s chief blacksmith when Jefferson had to fire his white blacksmith for chronic drunkenness in 1807. Joseph stepped into the job and expertly ran the forge for the next two decades. The overseer Edmund Bacon described him as “a very fine workman; could do anything…with steel or iron.”1
It was important enough to be the son of the blacksmith, but Peter Fossett’s status was further enhanced by his mother’s occupation: she was Jefferson’s cook. Edith Hern Fossett presided over the most modern culinary facility in Virginia, producing meals “in good taste and abundance” for a throng of diners, seven days a week, “in half Virginian, half French style,” as Daniel Webster recalled after a visit to Monticello in 1824.2
Edith Fossett’s extraordinary skill did not really become apparent to posterity until 2004, when the Monticello curators completed a reconstruction of the plantation’s kitchen, a spacious room underneath Jefferson’s private terrace in the south dependency. In Jefferson’s time it was a marvel of innovation. Jefferson had ordered it built while he was president so that it would be ready, when he returned to Monticello in 1809, to produce the high-style cuisine he had become accustomed to. Since he anticipated, correctly, an unending torrent of visitors, the kitchen would also have to produce its fine food in abundance. At most plantations the cooking wa
s done in an outbuilding in crude circumstances—dirt floor, an open hearth with a spit, and heavy cast-iron cookware.
Jefferson’s new kitchen had a large hearth and a traditional bread-baking oven, but also a “set kettle,” heated by charcoal, which yielded a steady, reliable flow of hot water. Along one wall stood a row of eight charcoal-heated burners called a stew stove. The heat of each burner could be individually regulated by a skilled cook, anticipating the convenience, flexibility, and utility of a modern, high-end multi-burner stove.3
Edith Fossett and her staff worked their culinary magic using some sixty pieces of French copper cookware, of a type seldom seen in the United States at that time—far lighter and much more efficient in conducting heat than cast-iron cookware.4 Skilled and experienced, the cooks maneuvered these skillets, tart pans, fish cookers, and chafing dishes over the burners of the stew stove to produce the French dishes and sauces Jefferson loved. As one of Monticello’s experts wrote, “The stew stove allowed cooks to regulate the heat beneath the stew pans, making possible the delicate elements of French dishes like bouilli with sauce hachée.”5
Monticello’s kitchen retained some old-fashioned features, such as a mechanical spit-jack—the eighteenth-century version of the rotisserie—and swiveling cranes to maneuver pots in and out of the fireplace. Oddly enough, the kitchen, redolent every day with smoke and cooking odors, boasted one of the most valuable items in the mansion—an extremely costly, highly accurate “kitchen timer” in the form of a tall-case clock. Jefferson wound it himself every eight days. The presence of this exquisite timepiece reveals the precise coordination and the high level of performance that created meals a visitor called “always choice, and served in the French style.”6
It is not enough to say that Jefferson was a gourmand. As one food historian wrote, Jefferson possessed “an intense interest in food and the critical role it played in how he conducted his private life.” He owned a collection of essays that included “On the Construction of Kitchen Fireplaces and Kitchen Utensils” and “Of the Construction of Saucepans and Stewpans for Fixed Fireplaces.” We have ten surviving recipes that he wrote down himself, as well as his “Observations on Soup,” though he had a poor understanding of how cooking was actually done.7 As far as we know, he never visited the kitchen to offer advice, entering it only to wind the clock.
The kitchen was the domain of Edith, the head chef, and her adjutant, Frances “Fanny” Hern. (They were sisters-in-law: Fanny’s husband, David Hern, was Edith’s brother.) The records hint at their culinary skills, but I did not realize how extraordinary those skills were until I spoke with Leni Sorensen, the historian who shed so much light on the agricultural records. An accomplished cook herself, Sorensen narrated a typical day in this kitchen.
Every day at least fourteen people were waiting upstairs to be fed—the core of the Jefferson-Randolph household. Often the kitchen fed eighteen to twenty, sometimes as many as twenty-five; one day the kitchen fed fifty-seven people. Sorensen characterized Frances Hern as the “adjutant,” a good military analogy for the highly disciplined nature of this culinary operation. Fossett and Hern would have been well aware of their owner’s extreme aversion to conflict or disorder of any kind, so they would have made every effort to ensure that the kitchen operation ran smoothly. When the master emerged for his predawn stroll along his terrace, directly over the kitchen, he would not have heard shouting, cursing, or helpers being hit but the rhythmic rattling of wooden spoons as scullions beat biscuit dough, the differing tones of mechanical music made by the grinding of the day’s ingredients—the master’s coffee beans, his varieties of sugar (there were several), his salt, and his chocolate. He would have smelled coffee roasting.
With breakfast due on the table at 9:00, Fossett, Hern, and the scullions would have been in the kitchen by 5:30 with three meals on their minds. The cooks would start slicing yesterday’s ham and getting today’s different breads set up while the assistants heated the bake oven and got the fireplace going with two separate fires—a hardwood fire on the right for roasting and a charcoal bed on the left to feed the eight burners of the stew stove. Once the charcoal was ready, they could get the set kettle started for their hot water.
In addition to ham, breakfast featured three types of raised breads. The dough had to be beaten and set to rise by 7:00 or 7:30 to be out of the oven by 8:45. They brewed coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. Jefferson was particular about his coffee, so the kitchen staff roasted beans every day or every other day. Hot chocolate was also made from scratch; they would grind a block of hard chocolate and then cook it. One of the boys would tend the fires in the hearth, feeding the charcoal stoves under the direction of the cooks to maintain correct temperatures and carrying out ashes, which were saved to make soap.
As the breads and muffins were baking, one or two people would begin dinner preparation, plucking at least half a dozen fowl (chickens, ducks, or geese). By midmorning the dinner prep was fully under way. It was “like making Thanksgiving dinner every day,” Sorensen said, a modern holiday feast being an “average” dinner at Jefferson’s house. Every dinner would feature three or four meats and a fish dish, plus four “made dishes” of vegetables with a sauce—potatoes, peeled asparagus (served on toast), parsnips, or an elaborate stuffed cabbage, which was not considered plebeian but a tasty staple of upper-class tables: the cooks would parboil a cabbage, scoop out the center, fill it with minced meat, tie it up in a cloth, poach it, drain it, then cut it into wedges and add a sauce.
Every day they prepared a ham—soaked to get the salt out, boiled, then roasted. Jefferson’s bouilli was a pot-roast-like dish of beef simmered with vegetables. For the fish there might be shad, or “cod sounds,” a dish made from dried salt cod that Jefferson loved and ordered by the barrel. Every meal featured up to four desserts—ice cream (for which vanilla beans had to be steeped), thin cookies, custards, cakes, and perhaps baked apples in pastry.
Every day Fossett and Hern coordinated the menus and provisions with Burwell Colbert, the butler, and Wormley Hughes, the head gardener, who would keep them up-to-date on what produce his acreage was yielding, what was ripening, and what was slow in coming. Once the cooking began, one of Jefferson’s granddaughters might appear from upstairs, take a seat in the kitchen, and begin reading aloud from a cookbook. In a letter Virginia Randolph Trist described herself as “seated upon my throne in the kitchen, with a cookery book in my hand.”8 It was an absurd ritual, but it was the tradition. After years of training and experience, Edith and Fanny had their routines and recipes memorized. The young mistress was actually learning from them, but the illusion of control had to be maintained.
The real function of the granddaughter was to fetch things. Everything of value had to be kept locked up. Jefferson’s granddaughters rotated as carriers of the keys, serving for a month at a time, a duty they loathed. After breakfast the granddaughter with the keys would meet with the cooks and be given the list of items needed for dinner—specialty items that might include brandy, raisins, sweet oil, and costly spices such as nutmeg. Jefferson’s taste had been refined in the dining rooms of France. When he returned to the Virginia wilderness from Europe, he shipped crates of items he had come to love: “mustard, vinegar, raisins, nectarines, macaroni, almonds, cheese, anchovies, olive oil, and 680 bottles of wine,” as one food historian writes. He continued to replenish his stock of these rare delicacies with regular shipments from Europe.9
Edith Fossett and Fanny Hern held their positions as a result of Jefferson’s long-term planning. He had chosen them for their future posts when they were very young; they trained for years in the White House kitchen; and Jefferson expected a lifetime of loyal service. When Jefferson was first elected president, he sought the advice of the French envoy in Philadelphia in finding a Frenchman to cook for him. He hired Etienne Lemaire as maître d’hôtel, the household administrator, and Honoré Julien as chef de cuisine. Taking the long view, Jefferson brought three young women from Montice
llo to learn the intricacies of French cuisine. One lasted only a brief time, but Fossett and Hern excelled at their demanding work.
Demanding it was. Jefferson hosted three dinners a week when Congress was in session so that he would get the chance to dine with all the nearly 150 members, believing that sitting down together at a fine meal inspired “harmony and good confidence.” The daily existence of the congressmen in their Washington boardinghouses was ghastly, in the view of one Englishman; they lived “like bears, brutalized and stupefied.” The Frenchmen and their enslaved pupils, augmented by a hired staff of free blacks and whites, performed heroic culinary labors. “Never before had such dinners been given in the President’s House,” said one guest. Jefferson’s marathon meals began at 3:30 in the afternoon, and some continued well into the night.10
In Jefferson’s estimation, one of the best servants he had at the White House was his butler, a slave named John Freeman whom Jefferson hired from an owner in Maryland. Freeman may have adopted his surname as a ferocious badge of pride: he knew he would be freed in 1815, since he had negotiated an arrangement with his owner gradually to purchase himself, and his White House pay went toward buying his manumission. Perhaps it was Freeman’s pride; perhaps it was his skill and the favor it brought him from the president; but Freeman also earned the outright hostility of some of the white servants, who did not like being put on a par with a slave. They especially did not like Freeman wearing the same livery as they. One white servant complained that the president “gave preference to a negro rather than to him,” but Jefferson squelched the man’s complaining: “the negro whom he thinks so little of, is a most valuable servant.”11 The records show that at one point Freeman suffered a broken jaw, whether from an accident or an assault we do not know.12
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 18