Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  If Jefferson had a discernible public position on slavery in the mid-1790s, it was that the subject should be allowed to retire gracefully from the field of political warfare, much as he was doing by retiring to Monticello. This represented a decided shift from his position as a younger man, when he had assumed a leadership role in pushing slavery onto the agenda in the Virginia Assembly and the federal Congress. His most famous formulations, it is true, were rhetorical: blaming the slave trade and the establishment of slavery itself on George III in the Declaration of Independence; denouncing slavery as a morally bankrupt institution that was doomed to extinction in Notes on Virginia. His most practical proposals, all of which came in the early 1780s, envisioned a program of gradual abolition that featured an end to the slave trade, the prohibition of slavery in all the western territories and the establishment of a fixed date, he suggested 1800, after which all newly born children of slaves would be emancipated. To repeat, up through this stage of his political career, he was a member of the vanguard that insisted on the incompatibility of slavery with the principles on which the American republic was founded. Throughout this early phase of his life it would have been unfair to accuse him of hypocrisy for owning slaves or to berate him for failing to provide moral leadership on America’s most sensitive political subject. It would in fact have been much fairer to applaud his efforts, most of them admittedly futile, to inaugurate antislavery reform and to wonder admiringly how this product of Virginia’s planter class had managed to develop such liberal convictions.

  Dating the origins of a long silence is an inherently imprecise business, but it would seem that Jefferson’s posture toward slavery began to shift in the mid- to late 1780s during his ministry to France. This is ironic, since during this same time he was telling his French audience misleadingly optimistic stories about the imminent demise of slavery in his native Virginia and playing the Parisian version of the American antislavery champion. But he was simultaneously beginning to back away from any leadership role in the American debate over slavery. “I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us,” he wrote in 1805, going on to reiterate his belief that slavery was an anomaly in republican America; but his abiding posture was that the current configuration of political forces blocked any meaningful reform at present, so that all one could realistically do was wait for the future to prepare public opinion for the inevitable. This more passive and fatalistic position, which he maintained for the remainder of his life, was the product of several different lines of thought that converged in his mind after 1785. It was in fact a more intellectually and psychologically complex view than it appears at first, and since it was the view he carried in his head to Monticello in 1794, its origins merit a moment of our attention.48

  First, as we have seen, Jefferson’s withdrawal from the antislavery vanguard followed directly upon publication of Notes on Virginia. The ringing denunciations of slavery presented there, which Jefferson had never intended for an American audience, made him a controversial figure, especially within the slave-owning class of Virginia, and the prospective leader of the still quite small group of progressive southern planters advocating some form of gradual emancipation. It was a prominent public role that ran against the grain of all his instincts for privacy. His deep-seated aversion to controversy actually caused him to exaggerate the expected personal criticism that Notes, or so he feared, would generate. But whether his apprehensions were mostly justified or mostly imagined was beside the point. He was simply not equipped temperamentally to stay at the cutting edge of the antislavery movement after he got a dose of the sharp feelings it aroused.

  Second, the more pessimistic implications of the argument he had made in Notes began to settle in and cause him to realize, for the first time, that he had no workable answer to the unavoidable question: what happens once the slaves are freed? This was the kind of practical question that Jefferson had demonstrated great ingenuity in avoiding on a host of other major political issues. Indeed, one of the most seductive features of his political thinking in general was its beguiling faith that the future could take care of itself. Slavery, however, proved to be the exception to this larger pattern of calculated obliviousness. For one brief moment, in 1789, he seemed to entertain a bold, if somewhat bizarre, scheme whereby emancipated slaves would be “intermingled” with imported German peasants on fifty-acre farms where both groups could learn proper work habits. But even this short-lived proposal served only to expose the inherent intractability of the postemancipation world as Jefferson tried to imagine it. His fundamental conviction, one that he never questioned, was that white and black Americans could not live together in harmony. He had already explained why in Notes: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions that nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.” Here was the single instance, with the most singularly significant consequences, when Jefferson was incapable of believing that “the dead hand of the past” could not be swept aside by the liberating forces unleashed by the American Revolution. Blacks and whites were inherently different, and though he was careful to advance the view “as a suspicion only,” people of African descent were sufficiently inferior to whites in mental aptitude that any emancipation policy permitting racial interaction was a criminal injustice to the freed slaves as well as a biological travesty against “the real distinctions that nature has made.” The unavoidable conclusion, then, was that slavery was morally wrong, but racial segregation was morally right. And until a practical solution to the problem of what to do with the freed slaves could be found, it made no sense to press for emancipation.49

  Third, during the latter phase of his French experience Jefferson became more intensely aware how much his own financial well-being depended upon the monetary value and labor of his slaves. As the depth of his own indebtedness began to sink in, there were three ways to raise large amounts of capital to appease his creditors: He could sell off land, as he did somewhat reluctantly by disposing of holdings in Cumberland and Goochland counties; he could sell slaves outright; and he could rent or lease the labor of his slaves to neighboring planters. He expressed considerable guilt about pursuing the last two options, suggesting it was a betrayal of his paternal obligations to the black members of his extended “family.” He gave specific instructions that particular slaves who had been with him for some time not be sold or hired out unless they wished it. But much as he disliked selling his slaves or temporarily transferring control over them to others, he recognized that such a course constituted “my only salvation.” In short, once he grasped the full measure of his personal economic predicament, the larger question of emancipation appeared in a new and decidedly less favorable light. It was now a matter on which he could not afford to be open-minded; nor, as it turned out, were the exigencies of this debt-induced predicament to change over his lifetime, except to grow worse.50

  The net result of all these influences was a somewhat tortured position on slavery that combined unequivocal condemnation of the institution in the abstract with blatant procrastination whenever specific emancipation schemes were suggested. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt captured the essential features and general flavor of Jefferson’s slavery stance during his visit to Monticello in June 1796: “The generous and enlightened Mr. Jefferson cannot but demonstrate a desire to see these negroes emancipated. But he sees so many difficulties in their emancipation, even postponed, he adds so many conditions to render it practicable, that it is thus reduced to the impossible. He keeps, for example, the opinion he advanced in his notes, that the negroes of Virginia can only be emancipated all at once, and by exporting to a distance the whole black race. He bases his opinion on the certain danger, if there were nothing else, of seeing blood m
ixed without means of preventing it.”51

  If his position on slavery as a young man merits a salute for its forthright and progressive character, his position as a mature man invites skepticism for its self-serving paralysis and questionable integrity. But latter-day moral judgments are notoriously easy to render from the comfortable perch that hindsight always provides. And such judgments ought not become a substitute for recovering Jefferson’s own understanding, no matter how flawed, of what he was doing when he resumed his role as master of Monticello. He saw himself, even more than his slaves, as the victim of history’s stubborn refusal to proceed along the path that all enlightened observers regarded as inevitable. In that sense he and his African-American charges were trapped together in a lingering moment, a historical backwater in which nature’s laws would be sorely tested as both sides waited together for the larger story of human liberation to proceed. In this overly extended transitional moment, his primary obligation was to serve as a steward for those temporarily entrusted to his care and to think of his slaves, as in fact he listed them in his Farm Book, as members of “my family,” to be cared for as foster children until more permanent and geographically distant accommodations could be found.52

  Although the self-serving character of this paternalistic posture might have an offensive odor and fraudulent look to us, it had decided advantages for Jefferson’s slaves as well as for Jefferson himself. The major reason why his many returns to Monticello were always greeted by the black population on the mountain as cause for celebration was that it meant the temporary end of control by overseers and the resumption of Jefferson’s more benevolent and generous authority. His residence meant fewer whippings, more dependable food and clothing distributions and the assurance of a more fair-minded arbiter of work schedules. No reliable evidence exists to document any instance in which Jefferson personally flogged a slave or dispensed any physical punishment himself. On rare occasions, and as a last resort, he ordered overseers to use the lash, but his general policy was to sell off troublemakers, effectively banishing them from his extended family as recalcitrant children. He was extremely reluctant to sell slaves against their will. When forced by his creditors to sell eleven slaves in 1792, he ordered that they all be selected from his more remote Bedford plantations and that the sale itself be carried out in a distant location, acknowledging that he “did not like to have my name annexed in the public papers to the sale of property.” On the other hand, he tried to respect the wishes of those slaves who asked to be sold, usually to be united with their families. In 1792, for example, he approved the sale of Mary Hemings to Thomas Bell, a local merchant, studiously avoiding mention of the fact that Bell, a white man, was the father of Mary’s two youngest children and the sale “according to her desire” would allow them to live together as common-law husband and wife.53

  Jefferson’s own highly developed network of interior defenses also helped sustain his paternalistic self-image by blocking out incongruous evidence (like the Hemings-Bell relationship) or consigning it to some oblivious region of his mind that was cut off from communication with the conscious world, a kind of internal banishment of recalcitrant ideas. Just as he could look squarely at the most atrocious acts of mob violence in revolutionary Paris and see only a momentary excess of human liberty, or could put Philip Freneau on his payroll as a partisan in the party wars without acknowledging a conflict of interest, or not even admit that he and Madison were orchestrating the political tactics of an opposition party, Jefferson possessed the psychological dexterity to overrule awkward perceptions, including the day-by-day realities of slave life. He was the kind of man who would have been able to take an oath—and if the technology for a lie detector test had been available, to have passed it—certifying that his slaves were more content and better off as members of his extended family than under any other imaginable circumstance. And like a general ensconced at headquarters, he conveyed a clear signal to his overseers in the fields that unpleasant incidents should not filter their way back up the mountain.

  Partly by geographic accident, partly by his own design, the organization of slave labor at Jefferson’s plantations reinforced this shielding mentality in several crucial ways. Recall, first of all, that his cultivated lands were widely distributed, half of them at Bedford, several days’ ride away. Until he built his second house at Poplar Forest during his final retirement, Jefferson seldom visited those remote estates. Recall too that, except for the temporary enthusiasm of 1794–95, he seldom ventured into his fields at Monticello or Shadwell except at harvesttime, leaving daily management of routine farming tasks to overseers. While he kept elaborate records of his entire slave population in his Farm Book, including the names and ages of all hands, his direct exposure to field laborers was limited. His cryptic notation on the division of slave labor is also revealing in this regard: “Children till 10 years of age to serve as nurses. From 10 to 16 the boys make nails, the girls spin. At 16 go into the ground or learn trades.” The ominous phrase “go into the ground” accurately conveyed Jefferson’s personal contact with that considerable majority of adult slaves who worked his fields. Except as names in his record books, they practically disappeared.54

  When Jefferson did encounter them, it was usually in the context of work on one of his several construction projects or as apprentices in the nailery. Most of his face-to-face contact with laboring slaves occurred in nonagrarian settings—the nailery, the sawmill, the construction site around the mansion—where he supervised them as workers doing skilled and semiskilled jobs. Even the nailery, with its overtones of assembly-line monotony and Dickensian drudgery, allowed him to think about the work of the slave boys as an apprentice experience providing them with a marketable trade. In explanation of Jefferson’s compulsive tendency to launch so many mechanical and construction projects at Monticello, it is possible that they not only served as outlets for his personal energies but also allowed him to design a more palatable context for interacting with his slaves as hired employees rather than as chattel.

  Finally, all the slaves working in the household, and most of those living along Mulberry Row on the mountaintop, were members of two families that had been with Jefferson since the earliest days of his marriage to Martha. They enjoyed a privileged status within the slave hierarchy at Monticello, were given larger food and clothing rations, considerably greater latitude of movement and even the discretion to choose jobs or reject them on occasion. Great George and his wife, Ursula, referred to as King George (a joke on George III) and Queen Ursula, were slaves in name only and effectively exercised control over management of the household. (When Jefferson asked Thomas Mann Randolph to tell Little George, their son, to perform a particular task, Randolph claimed that “George I am sure would not stoop to my authority… .”) The other and larger slave family were all Hemingses, headed by the matriarch, Betty Hemings, whom Jefferson had inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles, along with ten of her twelve children in 1773. It was an open secret within the slave community at Monticello that the privileged status enjoyed by the Hemings family derived from its mixed blood. Several of Betty’s children, perhaps as many as six, had most probably been fathered by John Wayles. In the literal, not just figurative sense of the term, they were part of Jefferson’s extended family. All the slaves he eventually freed were Hemingses, including Robert and James in 1794 and 1796 respectively. If what struck the other slaves at Monticello was the quasi-independent character of the Hemings clan with its blood claim on Jefferson’s paternal instincts, what most visitors tended to notice was their color. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt left this account in 1796: “In Virginia mongrel negroes are found in greater number than in Carolina and Georgia; and I have even seen, especially at Mr. Jefferson’s, slaves, who, neither in point of colour or features, showed the least trace of their original descent; but their mothers being slaves, they retain, of consequence, the same condition.”55

  Since the members of the Hemings family were the front-and-center
slaves at Monticello, most guests and visitors to the mountaintop experienced the Jeffersonian version of slavery primarily as a less black and less oppressive phenomenon than it actually was. As overseer Edmund Bacon recalled, “there were no Negro and other outhouses around the mansion, as you generally see on [other] plantations,” so the physical arrangement of appearances also disguised the full meaning of the slave experience. In short, Jefferson had so designed his slave community that his most frequent interactions occurred with African-Americans who were not treated like full-fledged slaves and who did not even look like full-blooded Africans because, in fact, they were not. In terms of daily encounters and routinized interactions, his sense of himself as less a slave master than a paternalistic employer and guardian received constant reinforcement.56

  By the same token, if slavery was a doomed institution whose only practical justification was to preserve the separation of the races until the day of deliverance arrived at some unspecified time in the future, Jefferson was surrounded by dramatic evidence that it was failing miserably at that task. Miscegenation at Monticello was obviously a flourishing enterprise, much more so than his wheat fields. Several of Betty Hemings’s grandchildren looked almost completely white, graphic testimony that whatever had begun with John Wayles had certainly not stopped back then. Jefferson’s stated aversion to racial mixture had somehow to negotiate its visible examples all around him. In a sense what he saw only confirmed his deepest fears about an amalgamation of the races, though his code of silence dictated that no mention of the matter be permitted in public. Despite his remarkable powers of avoidance, this is one topic we can be sure he brooded about, even if he never talked about it for the record. The eloquence of his silence provides the best evidence of what Monticello was like as a real place rather than an imagined ideal. If literary allusions afford the best mode of description, we need to dispense with Virgil’s pastoral odes and begin to contemplate William Faulkner’s fiction.