1, Great George, with tools and grindstone mounted in the single mule cart, should be constantly employed mending cradles and grinding scythes. The same cart would carry about the liquor, moving from tree to tree as the work advanced.
18 cradlers should work constantly.
18 binders, of the women and abler boys.
6 gatherers, to wit. 5 smallest boys and 1 large for a foreman.
3 loaders, Moses, Shepherd and Joe, leading the carts successively with the drivers.
6 stackers,
2 cooks,
4 carters
____
58
8 would remain to keep half the ploughs a-going.
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66
In this way the whole machine would move in exact equilibrio, no part of the force could be lessened without retarding the whole, nor increased without a waste of force.
This force would cut, bring in and shock 54 acres a day, and complete my harvest of 320 acres in 6 days.
As a matter of mathematics, there could be no doubt about this. Yet when the plan was put in practice on the next harvest, the imponderabilia, as Bismarck called them, stepped in and wrecked his calculations. The whole machine did not move in exact equilibrio—far from it. On July 2, we have the entry, “We stopped our ploughs, the pickers not keeping up with the cutters.” Again: “Though 18 mowers had been fixed on and furnished with 27 scythes, yet the wheat was so heavy for the most part that we had not more than 13 or 14 mowers cutting on an average.” Finally, alas! for the calculation of a complete harvest, cut, brought in and shocked in six days, though Dr. Small himself might have put the great seal of his certification on every figure, “13 cutters × 12 days = 156, which gives near 2 acres a day for each cutter, supposing 300 acres.” 1
Remembering Poe’s acute observation that the truly practical man must be a balanced combination of mathematician and poet, one often finds the sheer mathematician predominating in Mr. Jefferson’s dealings with human nature on the farm; as, for instance, in the observation that “a barrel of fish costing seven dollars goes as far with the labourers as two hundred pounds of pork costing fourteen dollars.” Many entries, too, seem over-curious. “Cart. H. Harrison tells me it is generally allowed that 250 lb. green pork makes 220 lb. pickled.” His own experiment turned out that “100 lb. of green pork makes 88 lb. pickled do. or 75 lb. of bacon.” He weighed a ham and shoulder when green: “The one weighed 24 lb. the other 17 lb. After they were made into bacon each had lost exactly a fourth.” Then the really important fact is dropped in with somewhat the air of an afterthought, “They were of cornf ed hogs.” In considering his grain harvest, he makes note that “G. Divers supposes that every cubic yard of a stack of wheat yields generally 2 bushels of grain,” and that “Jo. Watkins says he knows from actual experiment that wheat loses 2 lb. in the bushel weight from Oct. to January, which is 1 pr. cent pr. month”; also “it is thought that any ground will yeild as much wheat as rye, and that wheat exhausts less than rye.”
There is too little of the poet also in his minute observation that the interstices in corded wood, according to one authority, make one-third of the whole volume; remarking, however, that “various experiments giving from 10 parts solid for from 3½ to 8 interstices, averaged on the whole 3 parts solid to 2 void, so that the interstices are 2/5 and the solid 3/5.” The predominant mathematician is not content to know that cutting firewood with a saw is faster and less wasteful than cutting it with an axe. “The loss of wood in cutting firewood with an axe is 15 pr. cent, and takes twice as long as the saw, a tree of 18 i. being crosscutted in 4 minutes, and cut with the axe in 8 minutes.” Again: “The circuit of the base of Monticello is 5¼ miles; the area of the base about 890 acres. Within the limits of that base I this day tried the temperature of 15 springs, 10 on the South and 5 on the N. side of the mountain, the outward air being generally about 75° of Farenheit.” He then tabulates the result of this investigation, but there is nothing remarkable about the figures, and one can not make out from them any reason why he should have taken all this trouble to get them. Again: “Tom with his 3 small mules brings 15 bundles of nailrod = 840 lb. in his cart from Milton, which he considers is a very heavy load.” “Phill’s 3 mules bring 1600 lb. from Milton, a very heavy load for them. It was 25 bundles of nailrod and 200 lb. bar iron.”
Yet entries like these, little practical as they may be, are not quite worthless. They may be taken as a parallel to that other category of entries which runs along with them, noting the appearance of leaves, flowers and wild fruits, and the motion of birds and insects. Late in January of one year, for example, after record of the temperature comes the entry, “blue-birds are here.” On March 11, “blackbirds here”; on the 17th, “almonds bloom”; on the first of April, the single word “lilac”; on the second, “whippoorwill”; on the ninth, “martins appear.” In June, there is note of “a solar eclipse, almost total”; later in the month, “aurora borealis at 10 h. pm, abt 45° high on the horizon”; and still later, “a feild lark at Shadwell, the first I ever saw so far Westerly.” In the autumn again, in October, there is the line, “walnut and mulberry lost leaves.” Later in the month, the sobering record, “Cherry, common locust, lost leaves. First frost at Montic.”; and a week afterwards, “Poplars, white mulberry, wild crab, nearly stripped of leaves.” The winter was near.
The Duke of Saxe-Weimar paid a visit to Monticello in the last year of Mr. Jefferson’s life. He saw him in his setting of long, laborious days beginning at dawn—“the sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years”—noting carefully the wind and the weather, his eye on the leaves and flowers, his ear open to the birds’ note; isolated among “plain, honest and rational neighbours, some of them well informed and men of reading, all superintending their farms, hospitable and friendly, and speaking nothing but English”; intensely curious about the most insignificant of nature’s doings, getting opinions about them from the experience of fellow-labourers like G. Divers and Jo. Watkins, and diligently recording what he learned. In the English version of the Duke’s reminiscences, there is an odd and unusual translation of the German word ehrwürdig, which somehow sticks in one’s mind as most appropriate. On the morning of his departure, he says, “after breakfast, which we took with the family, we bid the respectable old man farewell, and set out upon our return to Charlottesville.”
IV
Mr. Jefferson’s farming managed to pay its way for a time, but not by a comfortable margin. At almost any point in his history one is prepared to find him anticipating the modern lawyer-farmer, who practises law to keep the farm going. He had an immense amount of land; so much that if land had been taxed even nominally, he would have been land-poor. He owned more than a dozen properties, with a total of nearly eleven thousand acres; half of it in Albemarle County, half in Bedford and Campbell. In 1774 he became owner, by land-patent, of the Natural Bridge, in Rockbridge County, a matter of about 150 acres. He acquired this out of a sheer art-collector’s spirit; he was in love with the place, “the most sublime of nature’s works. . . . It is impossible for the sensations arising from the sublime to be felt beyond what they are here. . . . The rapture of the spectator is really indescribable.” He had thoughts now and then “of building a little hermitage at the Natural Bridge (for it is my property) and of passing there a part of the year at least”; but his building operations were always more or less over-extended, and he never got around to this one. Not one-fifth of his land in Albemarle was under cultivation, and not one-sixth of his property in Bedford. The property at Monticello came to a little more than one thousand acres, and it barely sufficed to keep the household going; it did not—if one can believe it—yield enough surplus to feed the guests. True, the household was large; the house-servants alone numbered between thirty and forty. Guests, moreover, came not singly or occasionally, but in hordes, with horses and carriages and servants; in the last twenty years of Mr. Jefferson’s life, it may be said literally and without exaggeration tha
t they ate him out of house and home. There was a good deal of hill-side farming, too, on the Monticello property. But making every possible allowance for everything, almost any kind of farming ought to enable a thousand acre property to give a better account of itself than Monticello ever gave; for in 1794 he records that on this property “on both sides of the river we have made thirty-seven and a half bushels of wheat above what has been sowed for next year”!
He complains of “the ravages of overseers,” during his protracted absences on public duty, and no doubt they were bad. With a touch of grim humour he speaks his mind about overseers, and also about the Virginian implantation of Scots-Irish, in a letter to William Wirt, written in 1815 in reply to a question concerning class-distinctions in early Virginian society. “Certain families had risen to splendour by wealth and the preservation of it from generation to generation under the law [of] entails; some had produced a series of men of talents, families in general had remained stationary on the grounds of their forefathers, for there was no emigration to the westward in those days. The wild Irish, who had gotten possession of the valley between the Blue Ridge and North Mountain, forming a barrier over which none ventured to leap, and would still less venture to settle among. . . . There were then aristocrats, half-breeds, pretenders; a solid independent yeomanry, looking askance at those above, yet not venturing to jostle them; and, last and lowest, a fæculum of beings called overseers, the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race, always cap in hand to the Dons who employed them, and furnishing material for the exercise of their pride, insolence and spirit of domination.” In his farm-book he makes note of “articles for contracts with overseers,” in one of which there is the odd provision that overseers are “not allowed to keep a horse or a goose, or to keep a woman out of the crop for waiting on them.” Some light on the ways of overseers, perhaps, appears in the agreement that the overseer shall “exchange clear profits with his employer at the end of the year, if the employer chuses it.” The overseer, too, must “pay his share of liquor and hiring at harvest,” as a measure for promoting economy in the use of both.
Bad as the ravages of overseers may have been, however, there were worse, due to the military policy of terrorism established in Virginia by Cornwallis. Mr. Jefferson’s interest in the four thousand prisoners of Burgoyne’s army, quartered in Virginia, had been substantial. He helped them establish themselves comfortably, made their officers at home in his house, and came publicly to their defence when the rural population, in a silly panic over a possible scarcity of food, was bringing pressure on Governor Henry to make them move out. For this he got their lasting gratitude and friendship, and with some of them, such as von Riedesel, von Geismer, and von Unger, he kept up acquaintance for a long time. His philosophy of the occasion is shown in a letter to the British major-general Phillips, acknowledging some complimentary phrases, and remarking that “the great cause which divides our countries is not to be decided by individual animosities. The harmony of private societies can not weaken national efforts. To contribute by neighbourly intercourse and attention to make others happy, is the shortest and surest way of being happy ourselves.” This novel doctrine no doubt puzzled Phillips considerably, for he was a good soldier, with a soldier’s mentality and a soldier’s sense of the public value of “individual animosities” in time of war; but it seems, nevertheless, to have made some impression on him.
Thus it was, probably, that some of the bread which Mr. Jefferson sowed on the turbid waters of nationalist hatred came back to him at the hands of Tarleton, one of the subordinate British commanders in eastern Virginia. The unexpected strength shown by the Americans in the North, and the unexpected obstinacy of their resistance, caused the British to turn their attention to Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, in a campaign of devastation. Phillips and Arnold ravaged the Tidewater and Piedmont sections of Virginia, and Tarleton moved on Albemarle County to disperse the Assembly which was in session at Charlottesville. By this time Mr. Jefferson had succeeded Patrick Henry in the Governorship. While gathering up and bagging what stray legislators he could find, Tarleton, who despite his profession seems to have been much of a man, sent a detachment to Monticello under Captain McLeod, to go through the motions of capturing Governor Jefferson.1 The expedition really amounted to no more than this. Tarleton gave strict orders that nothing at Monticello should be injured. Mr. Jefferson rode away from the house on horseback no more than five minutes before McLeod appeared, and no serious effort was made to overtake him. Captain McLeod remained at Monticello for a day, reconnoitring in a perfunctory fashion, and then moved off. Some of his men chivvied the negro house-servants a little, merely by way of entertaining themselves, but no harm was done to anyone or to anything.
In general, however, the British did their work with great thoroughness. “History will never relate the horrors committed by the British army in the Southern States of America,” Mr. Jefferson wrote to Dr. Gordon. “They raged in Virginia six months only. . . . I suppose their whole devastations during those six months amounted to about three millions sterling.” Mr. Jefferson’s properties outside Albemarle fell under the hand of Cornwallis himself, who seems to have been untroubled by scruples of any kind. “He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco. He burned all my barns containing the same articles of the last year, having first taken what corn he wanted; he used, as was to be expected, all my stock of cattle, sheep and hogs for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service; of those too young for service he cut the throats; and he burned all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave it an absolute waste. He carried off also about thirty slaves. Had this been to give them freedom, he would have done right; but it was to consign them to inevitable death from the small pox and putrid fever, then raging in his camp. . . . Wherever he went, the dwelling-houses were plundered of everything which could be carried off.”
Severe as these losses were, Mr. Jefferson never alluded to them publicly, as far as is known, until seven years afterward, when in answer to Dr. Gordon’s inquiries, he wrote the foregoing account of them in a characteristically objective fashion. He contented himself with entering his “losses by the British in 1781” as a bare business item in his farm-book. From his Cumberland property, eight slaves “fled to the enemy and died.” Of twenty-seven others from his various properties, some “caught small pox from enemy and died”; some “joined enemy, returned and died.” Some stay-at-homes “caught the camp fever from the negroes who returned, and died.” He was faithful to the sick runaways, even to those who were too far gone to have any further value as property, bringing them back on mattresses and stretchers, and giving them care. “Expenses seeking and bringing back some” are put down at twenty pounds sterling, and he “paid Doctors attending sick” sixty-five pounds.
These interruptions and devastations were bad for farming. In this same year, 1781, Mr. Jefferson records that most of the crops which he had on his undamaged properties were “lost for want of labourers.” With the drawbacks of war, long absence, intense preoccupation with public affairs, “the ravages of overseers,” slave labour and a series of bad seasons, all added to the fact that Mr. Jefferson, notwithstanding his science, ability and diligence, had not much of the humbler man’s natural knack with practical farming, one is not surprised that his agricultural operations went on three legs to the end. The astonishing thing, as he himself says, is that they should have managed to drag on for so long a time as sixty years before coming to their final breakdown in bankruptcy.
V
One great bar to his prosperity in early days was Mrs. Jefferson’s share of a debt incurred by her father to some British creditors. This amounted, in round numbers, to four thousand pounds sterling; and various depreciations of currency and fluctuations in exchange resulted actually in his paying the debt three times over, at a sacrifice of nearly half his estate. The general matter of debts due from the colonists to British creditors was an important public question whi
ch remained unsettled until the adoption of the Constitution. It was felt by many that since these debts had been in large part brought about by deliberate manipulation in the English market, they might fairly be repudiated. Several States, in fact, had enabled their repudiation, more or less directly. Mr. Jefferson was not unsympathetic towards this view, but declined to exercise it in his own interest. “What the laws of Virginia are or may be,” he wrote his creditors, “will in no wise influence my conduct. Substantial justice is my object, as decided by reason, and not by authority or compulsion.” The damages inflicted on him by Cornwallis more than offset the debt; still, that was a matter of public policy, while the debt was a private affair, the British creditors were private persons, and he thought that the line between private and public responsibility should be kept as clear as the line between private animosities and public issues. He finally satisfied his creditors by selling his land on virtual terms of a forced sale. His first sale for this purpose amounted to £4200, and he afterwards told his grandchildren in grim jest that he got only enough out of it in real money to pay for a new overcoat; for he sold at hard-money prices, taking in payment bonds which were subsequently redeemed in paper money worth about two cents in the dollar.
He carried on some manufacturing operations on his properties under stress of necessity, for the rural proprietors in Virginia had to make nearly everything they used. “Every article is made on his farm,” wrote the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. “His negroes are cabinetmakers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc. The young and old negresses spin for the clothing of the rest.” Mr. Jefferson did not go in for clothmaking on a large scale, however, until some years after the Duke’s visit, when commerce with Europe was interrupted by the circumstances which led up to the war of 1812; then, vowing his independence of foreign manufacturers, he put in improved machinery which, “costing $150 only, and worked by two women and two girls, will more than furnish” the two thousand yards of linen, cotton and woollen goods which he needed yearly. He employed slaves at shoemaking, noting in his farm-book that “a side of upper leather and a side of soal make 6 pr. shoes and take ½ lb. thread, so that a hide and 1 lb. of thread shoe 6 negroes.” His cost-accounting system brings the “worth of a pair of shoes,” reckoning labour at two shillings, to eight shillings sixpence. It seems a good price, though slave labour was slow and inefficient. Every line of work, indeed, felt this steady drag of inefficiency. “Johnny Hemings began the body of a Landau Jan. 12, and finished it this day, being 9 weeks + 5 days. He had not more help from Lewis than made up for his interruptions. The smith’s work employed the 2 smiths perhaps of the same time.” Again: “Johnny Hem. and Lewis began a dressing-table and finished it in exactly 6 weeks of which 4 weeks was such dreadful weather that, even within doors, nothing like full work could be done.”
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