Every worker was a necessary cog in the machine, including enslaved women. Jefferson forbade his white overseers from keeping a woman from the work of his harvest by appropriating her labor for their own purposes. His calculations depended on every pair of hands. Four men and a girl working the threshing machine twelve hours could produce forty bushels of clean grain when the machine was working smoothly, he computed. When the harvest was done, he thought ahead to clearing more land for spring planting. Grubbing, as it was called, was a laborious process, using a hoe to clear the land of weeds, briars, rocks, and roots. It had taken two slaves three and a half hours to clear just one-seventh of an acre in the graveyard where his beloved wife and children lay buried. Based on that observation, Jefferson estimated that a “laborer will grub from half an acre to an acre a week of common brush land in winter.”
Over all this work, Jefferson kept a close eye. “On the north terrace of Monticello was the telescope,” former slave Peter Fossett recalled, a perpetual reminder of the master’s watchful gaze. From there, Jefferson could watch work developing on his other plantations; Pantops (which interestingly means “all-seeing”) and Tufton were clearly in his sight lines. So too was his beloved “academical village,” the university being built three miles away in Charlottesville in the early 1820s. A worker on the project recalled Jefferson watching “we alls at work through his spyglass.”
The next tier of enslaved workers toiled closer to his home, on the mountain in Mulberry Row, a thousand-foot-long tree-lined lane that separated the mansion from the vegetable terrace. In 1796, Mulberry Row contained seventeen buildings that were the industrial hub of Jefferson’s plantations. One of the most profitable (at least initially) of Jefferson’s enterprises along Mulberry Row was the nailery. Set up in 1794, the nailery alone made enough money to support his slaves, Jefferson reported with satisfaction the following year. It was the perfect place to train young boys between ten and sixteen who had been left idle in the switch from tobacco to wheat. In practice, it also proved to be the staging ground that would decide their future: The industrious, productive boys who forged the most nails with the least waste would be promoted to the best jobs in their adulthood. Wormley Hughes became Jefferson’s head gardener, for example, and Burwell Colbert his personal valet and butler. Inept boys were sent to work “in the ground,” forever to be part of Jefferson’s agricultural machine. Rebellious boys were whipped and exiled, sold south never to see their families again. Each boy had until his sixteenth birthday to try to influence his master’s decision about the course his life would take.
It was exhausting work and brutally hot, especially in sweltering Virginia summers. Four fires burned in the nailery, each surrounded by workers, each of whom held the tip of his iron rod in the flames until a nail-length piece of iron could be broken off. Laying the hot iron on the anvil, the boys then swung their hammers to shape a nail, point at one end and head at the other. Jefferson set daily goals for each worker, depending on his age, size, and other duties on the plantation. In a typical summer workday—fourteen hours long—twenty thousand swings of George Granger’s son Isaac’s hammer yielded an exceptional output of a thousand nails a day. Jefferson measured everything: the weight of each uncut rod and the resulting nails, as well as the profit or waste each worker generated. The discipline of the work and the productivity of industry, he hoped, would build character in his workers. Once, when he transferred nailers to duty chopping down trees, he argued that it would be good for their character. “It will be useful to them morally and physically…to give them full employment,” he believed. And, of course, the profit they made supported his bottom line. It was a neat way to convince himself that “providence has made our interests & our duties coincide perfectly.”
Mulberry Row housed other industrial activities as well, such as the smithy and the joinery. Jefferson built two coal sheds in 1790 to house a convenient supply of fuel to keep the fires going in the blacksmith shop and his home. As always, Jefferson began by hiring white men to train his slaves. Yet there were exceptions. Joseph Fossett, the grandson of Elizabeth Hemings, was so successful in the nailery, rising to foreman by 1800, that Jefferson chose him for further training as a blacksmith under a talented but drunkenly erratic white man. When Jefferson finally fired him, Fossett officially became the head of the blacksmith shop he had actually been running for years. Fossett’s ability, as Edmund Bacon noticed, to “do anything it was necessary to do with steel or iron” was well known in the neighborhood, and he served area farmers as well as his master, who allowed him to keep one-sixth of his earnings.
Perhaps one of the most gifted artisans on Mulberry Row was John Hemings, Sally’s younger brother, who worked in Jefferson’s joinery shop. He had spent his boyhood chopping down trees, and building various structures on Jefferson’s plantations. In 1793, Jefferson hired David Watson (a British deserter during the Revolution and another notorious drinker) to train Hemings to “make wheels, and all sorts of work,” but Hemings’s real abilities were unleashed when Jefferson hired Irish immigrant James Dinsmore in 1798 to craft the interior woodwork in his newly remodeled home. Hemings was his assistant until Dinsmore’s departure in 1809, when Hemings then led the work of the joinery. Like Fossett, Hemings commanded overseer Bacon’s respect for his work. “He could make anything that was wanted in woodwork,” Bacon observed admiringly. His expertise ranged from carving the beautifully crafted arch that separated Jefferson’s cabinet from his library to repairing plows to fashioning furniture from sketches drawn by Jefferson. He was the principal interior woodworker when Jefferson built his retirement getaway home of Poplar Forest. Jefferson paid him an annual gratuity and even allowed his clothing purchases in town to be put on his master’s account. Beloved by Jefferson’s family, who called him “Daddy,” Hemings was devoted to Jefferson as well.
Jefferson was conscious of his obligations as master of people he saw as both inferior to and wholly dependent upon him, so he also strove to alleviate their labor with humanitarian principles, encouraging rather than terrorizing them. As a French visitor commented after touring Jefferson’s operation in 1796, “He animates them by rewards and distinctions.” Isaac Granger Jefferson remembered that Jefferson gave the boys in the nail factory “a pound of meat a week, a dozen herrings, a quart of molasses and peck of meal. Give them that wukked the best a suit of red or blue: encouraged them mightily.” Jefferson liked the idea, borrowed from a neighbor and recorded in his Farm Book, of providing financial incentives for slaves who produced more than their weekly requirement. There were also numerous instances in which he interceded to stave off punishments he judged degrading, believing that his favorable opinion would serve as better incentive to good behavior and productivity.
The son of Great George and Ursula Granger, Isaac Granger Jefferson was born at Monticello in 1775. He was with Jefferson when the British invaded Richmond, accompanied him to Philadelphia to learn tinsmithing in the 1790s, and was the most skilled worker in the nailery. Gifted to the Eppeses on their marriage, Isaac was later purchased by Tom Randolph, for whom he worked as a blacksmith. Pictured here a free man at age seventy-one, Isaac Jefferson was still vigorously plying that trade in Petersburg, Virginia, when he told his story to an interviewer in 1847.
But the Farm Book does not tell us everything about what it was like to live in slavery under Jefferson’s mastery. It does not sound the gong that visitors to Monticello can still hear today, marking the passage of the long hours during which his slaves were forced to produce. It does not reveal the way in which his nailery was inspired by the latest theories of penal reform, such as he had seen in Philadelphia in the 1790s, which were designed to make productive workers of prisoners. And while the force of his personality and his system of rewards and distinctions may have bound slaves in the house and on Mulberry Row to him, that was not so with field hands, who toiled far from the main house under the disciplining hand of an overseer.
A master of the art of
persuasion, Jefferson hated the whip. He was pleased when Thomas Mann Randolph, supervising his plantations in his absence in 1792, reported that his overseer Clarkson “has a valuable art of governing the slaves which sets aside the necessity of punishment almost entirely.” “My first wish is that the labourers may be well treated,” Jefferson replied magnanimously, commending his overseer. Later he acknowledged his obligation to feed, clothe, and protect his slaves “from all ill usage” and to require of them “such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freeman.” He would not run his plantations with ill-fed, nearly naked, abused, and overworked slaves. Such sentiments may explain why Edwin Morris Betts, who edited Jefferson’s Farm Book for publication, concluded that “life for the slaves on Jefferson’s plantations was probably a happy one” or why Dumas Malone’s six-volume biography judged Jefferson’s slaveholding as “kind to the point of indulgence.”
But the fact is that if Jefferson himself did not use the whip, he employed overseers who did. He hired William Page to supervise his slaves at Shadwell. So brutal a reputation did Page have that when Jack Eppes employed him for a year, he was unable to find anyone who would lease slaves to him. Jefferson had made a point of asking Tom Randolph to make sure that overseer Gabriel Lilly governed the nailery without resorting to the whip, except “in extremities,” but he let pass, unremarked, Tom’s reply that none of the nailery workers “have incurred it but the small ones for truancy.” Although Jefferson preferred restraint for his productive nailers, Lilly did not need to worry about being chastised by his employer, so long as he kept Jefferson’s customers supplied.
More than a year after this exchange, another incident occurred in the nailery in which Jefferson did intervene—this time, however, to ensure the severity of the culprit’s punishment. Wielding one of the heavy hammers of his trade, Cary, a seventeen-year-old nailer, broke the skull of Brown Colbert, a grandson of Elizabeth Hemings. Amazingly, Colbert survived the attack, but hearing of the altercation in Washington, Jefferson was furious. “It will be necessary for me to make an example of him in terrorem [terror] to others,” he instructed Tom Randolph. Cary was to disappear from Monticello. Immediately. A slave trader from Georgia was Jefferson’s first suggestion, but if none could be had, then “he could be sold in any other quarter so distant as never more to be heard of among us.” The effect for those remaining behind at Monticello, Jefferson emphasized, “would be as if he were put out of the way by death.” Cary would not threaten a Hemings or Jefferson’s nail business again.
Interestingly, however, Jefferson did not fire Lilly when he beat James Hemings, the seventeen-year-old son of Critta Hemings, Sally’s older sister. The young man had been ill, and James Oldham, a white carpenter working on Jefferson’s remodeling project, had been taking care of the sick boy and feared for his life. Oldham later provided Jefferson with an account of Lilly’s “barbarity.” Refusing to believe that he was too ill to work in the nailery, Lilly rousted Hemings out of bed and whipped him so severely that Hemings “was really not able to raise his hand to his head.” Once recovered, James Hemings fled. Briefly recaptured in Richmond six months later, he was unpersuaded by Jefferson’s pleas to return. Nor did Jefferson try further to pursue him. It is telling that even after losing a valuable slave—and a Hemings, at that—Lilly felt confident enough of Jefferson’s approval of his methods to ask that his salary be doubled. Balking at the figure, Jefferson refused, although with regret. “Certainly I could never get a man who serves my purposes better than he does,” Jefferson sighed ruefully to Tom Randolph as he let Lilly go.
Jefferson’s “first wish” may have been leniency for his slaves, but his second and overriding policy was that his slaves “may enable me to have that treatment continued by making as much as will admit it.” In other words, if they were cooperative, they would be spared. If they were not, there would be consequences. They might face a whipping. Or they might be demoted from his benign supervision on the mountain to fieldwork under a William Page or Gabriel Lilly, whose job was to ensure profitability. Or their master could make it seem as if they had dropped off the face of the earth.
As he did on the use of punishments, Jefferson had a mixed record on arguably the most important aspect of his slaves’ existence: family life. Of course, no state in the union legally recognized the marriages of slaves: “Property” obviously could not marry. Nor would masters allow their convenience to be constrained by their slaves’ marital or parental bonds if sale or dispersal made good business sense. But unlike many southern slaveholders, Jefferson at least professed concern for the integrity of his slaves’ marriages and family bonds. In fact, he encouraged his slaves to choose partners from among his own slave communities. “Certainly there is nothing I desire so much as that all the young people in the estate intermarry with one another and stay at home,” he wrote to his overseer at Poplar Forest, adding, “They are worth a great deal more in that case than when they have husbands and wives abroad.” When he decided to sell some slaves to help reduce the inherited Wayles debt, he had approached his brother Randolph, hoping that he might be able to identify a buyer in his neighborhood for “Dinah & her family,” since Randolph owned Dinah’s husband, thus enabling the couple to live near each other.
Other instances of Jefferson’s willingness to accommodate slave relationships occurred closer to home. When Jefferson returned from France, he found that Mary Hemings, Sally’s eldest sister, had borne two children to his Charlottesville neighbor, a white man named Thomas Bell. A merchant in town, Bell had hired Mary from Jefferson during his absence. Two years after Jefferson’s return, Mary Hemings asked to be sold to Bell. Acquiescing, Jefferson instructed his agent to “dispose of Mary according to her desire to Colonel Bell, with such of her younger children as she chose.” Of course, in this case, Jefferson was also taking into account the wishes of a white man he respected. Nonetheless, his sale of Mary Hemings was of a piece with similar decisions he made to buy and sell other married slaves to unite them, such as blacksmith Moses Hern. Hern repeatedly requested that Jefferson buy his wife and children, who were owned by Jefferson’s nephew Randolph Lewis, six miles away. Not until Lewis was picking up stakes to move to Kentucky did Jefferson finally yield, although he was clearly put out. “Nobody feels more strongly than I do the desire to make all practicable sacrifices to keep man and wife together who have imprudently,” he judged, “married out of their respective families.” In another case, he went “exactly counter” to his aim to retain strong young men for his own plantations and agreed to sell Brown Colbert (who wanted to remain with his wife, whose owner was moving to Kentucky), because he was “always willing to indulge connections seriously formed by those people”—at least “where it can be done reasonably.” He did try to exact a surcharge of an extra one hundred dollars for Colbert’s smithing expertise in the bargain, however.
Whatever his strong desire to accommodate enslaved families, Jefferson did separate families if it suited him. When he recommended that Isabel Hern escort little Maria across the Atlantic, he disregarded the fact that on that risky voyage of an indeterminate duration, Isabel was not only pregnant but would have left behind a husband (his trusted wagoner, Davy) and four children. Joseph Fossett and Edith Hern were probably already married when Jefferson took the fifteen-year-old Edith (the child with whom Isabel had been pregnant when Jefferson suggested that she accompany Maria to France) to Washington to learn French cookery during his presidency. He airily downgraded the commitment she and Joseph had forged together, from marriage to “formerly connected,” perhaps to allow himself to separate them for eight years with no pangs of conscience. After four years, however, when Jefferson returned home for a holiday without Edith, Joseph disappeared from Monticello. He reappeared in the yard of the President’s House in Washington, where his wife was working. Puzzled that Fossett had run away although he had “never in his life received a blow from any one,” Jefferson alerted a loyal Irish servant at the White House
to pursue him. Jailed for the night, Fossett was sent back to Monticello the next day, where he waited until Jefferson’s second term of office was over to be reunited with his wife.
Nor did Jefferson always honor the bond between mother and child. Although he agreed to sell Mary Hemings to Thomas Bell along with their two children, her older children by other fathers, twelve-year-old Joseph Fossett and nine-year-old Betsy Hemmings, were decidedly not part of the deal and remained in Jefferson’s possession. (He had already given away two of her other children as gifts.) And when the Jefferson family celebrated Maria’s wedding to Jack Eppes, three enslaved families were forced to bid heartbreaking goodbyes to four children, ages ten to fourteen, gifts from Jefferson to the newlyweds who then moved to Eppington, three days’ journey away.
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THIS WAS THE WORLD into which Jefferson’s third surviving daughter, Harriet Hemings, was born on a spring day in 1801. To some extent, the extended Hemings family was spared the pain of separation, although Maria’s wedding gift had included two of Elizabeth Hemings’s granddaughters: Betsy, the daughter of Mary Hemings Bell, and Melinda Colbert, the daughter of Sally’s older sister Betty Brown. Sally’s children were never to be sold or gifted away from her, however, although in their adulthood two would leave the mountain forever, likely never to see her again. Still, the relative security of her immediate family was itself a significant mark of distinction in the slave community at Monticello, even among the extended Hemings clan.
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