With ongoing discussions of Henry Wiencek’s new book [ht: sm], Master of the Mountain, we learn more and more about Thomas Jefferson, the economy of Monticello, and the profits and punishments of the slave south.
One of the incontestable strengths of Wiencek’s book is the way it transports readers deep into the hierarchical world of Jefferson’s Monticello — an earthly paradise of rationality, built and maintained on foundations of barbarism. Jefferson has been characterized as a progressive master, but “the Monticello machine,” Wiencek says, “operated on calibrated violence.” Among many other sources, he points to a formerly deleted passage in Jefferson’s Farm Book, a daily compendium of working life at Monticello. That report describes how the output of the nail forge was improving because “the small ones” who worked there were being whipped. Those “small ones” were slave boys of between 10 and 12 years old.
Wiencek also evocatively describes Jefferson’s morning routine — how he would walk back and forth on his terrace every day at first light and look down on a small empire of slaves — among them, brewers, French-trained cooks, carpenters, textile workers and field hands. Many of those slaves were related to each other; some were related — by marriage and blood — to Jefferson himself. Jefferson’s wife had six half-siblings who were enslaved at Monticello. To add to the Gothic weirdness, Jefferson’s own grandson, Jeff Randolph, recalled a number of mixed-race slaves at Monticello who looked astonishingly like his grandfather, one man “so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” According to this grandson, Sally Hemings was only one of the women who gave birth to these Jeffersonian doubles.
Wiencek’s scholarship infers that the potent combination of the profits and sexual access generated by slavery made the institution more palatable to Jefferson. As the years went by, Jefferson was called to account by his aging revolutionary comrades — among them the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Paine and Thaddeus Kosciuszko. All of them pressed Jefferson on the question of why this eloquent defender of liberty would himself be a slave owner. Kosciuszko even drew up a will in which he left Jefferson money to buy his slaves’ freedom and educate them, so that, as he wrote, “each should know … the duty of a cytysen in the free Government.”
According to Wiencek, Jefferson put off each of these patriots agitating for emancipation with a variation of the response “not yet.” When Kosciuszko died, his estate was Jefferson’s for the taking; but he refused the bequest and held onto his profit-generating slaves.
Jefferson’s reluctance to free his slaves stemmed largely from his copious amounts of indebtedness and his plantation’s poor financial health. Herbert E. Sloan’s detailed account of Jefferson’s finances, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt, does a great job of highlighting his financial problems. (Alas, this book is out of print.) This is not meant to suggest the (largely) free labor pool of Jefferson’s can be supported, but in his eyes Jefferson couldn’t see any way out of this conundrum. In fact, as Sloan reveals, many plantation owners were in like financial straits. It seems very few of them could have financially managed a plantation without slavery, a pathetic thought indeed, but it does begin to shed light on plantation owners’ unwillingness to let go of slavery. For the plantation owners at least, over time the antebellum arguments became less about states’ rights and more about hanging on to their operations.
This state of affairs only grew worse. Slavery allowed a copious amount of profitability for plantations in the 18th century. This, in turn, supported ever enlarged lifestyles, and plantation owners tried to out-Jones each other. After awhile, such insatiable materialistic appetites required more and more money and, at some tipping point, even the slave labor could no longer compensate for the expenditures and the debt started to pile up.
This trend unfolded in the 19th century. To the ever damnation of the founders, if one reads Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention, the southern delegates appeared to have been willing to work out an exit strategy for slavery, but the opportunity was allowed to slide into oblivion. This willingness suggests that at the time (1787), plantation owners, in general, were probably in better financial shape, and something could have been worked out. But the delegates had been hammering away at the Constitution for five months, that summer in Philadelphia was hot, the windows remained closed to prevent bystanders from listening in and the flies out, and even with a willingness working out the details would have taken more time and argument, all of which added up to shelving the slavery issue for another day… which didn’t get addressed for another 73 years.
However, we must be careful about these ad hominem attacks. While we can damn the giver (Jefferson), we cannot damn his gifts (America’s ideals). After all, the natural rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, among other founding ideals, have made America a unique nation in history. At the very least, embrace John Locke, who was the primary influence on Jefferson’s political writings. I was appalled when watching Henry Louis Gates, Jr., step into a high school history class, inform the apparently uninformed students on the Jefferson-Hemmings relationship, and then stand back and listen to the students state they couldn’t believe in anything Jefferson wrote. With that kind of a backlash, America’s freedoms will quickly go dark.
[...] with slavery continues: first with Henry Wiencek’s new book (here and here), and then with Paul Finkelman’s recent op-ed [...]