In the salons of France, Jefferson conducted the equivalent of a graduate seminar on slavery as the engine of the American enterprise. Confronted for the only time in his life by abolitionists who were actually in a position to keep him from something he wanted, trading rights for the emerging nation, Jefferson went up against these progressives—men like Lafayette who had worn the uniform of the fight for liberty—matched them theory for theory, trumped them with tales of his experience dealing with slaves, and so deftly explained the peculiar, inexplicable institution that to this day no one can figure out exactly what he meant. But he concluded his time in France with an apparently clear pledge to train and free his slaves on his return to Virginia.
Other ideas were percolating in his head. While selling America’s tobacco, he knew he would have to abandon planting it himself. (In a strangely modern twist, Jefferson had taken note of the measurable climate change in his region: the Chesapeake region was unmistakably cooling and becoming inhospitable to heat-loving tobacco that would soon, he thought, become the staple of South Carolina and Georgia.) He visited farms and inspected equipment, considering a new crop and the exciting prospect it opened before him. And he envisioned an ambitious engineering project, the rebuilding of a canal and mill, built by his father, that had been washed away in a flood.
He was also thinking of his mansion. French architecture had fired Jefferson’s imagination. He returned bursting with ideas for building a new Monticello. To erect this Xanadu, while also shifting crops and getting a canal built, he needed both skilled slaves and common laboring slaves. All of them had to be persuaded in one way or another to go along with the master’s ardor for enterprise.
Once he set foot in Virginia in 1789, Jefferson got down to business. Its morals aside, his elaborate program at Monticello in the 1790s would make an excellent case study in business schools today. Jefferson the philosopher has been endlessly parsed, but Jefferson the on-the-ground manager is most revealing, carrying us closer to the truth of slavery than anything he wrote in Notes or his other explications of slavery. At Monticello in the 1790s we find innovation; strategic investment; the conveyance of assets to the next generation; methods of controlling and motivating a workforce; critical turning points where conflicts must be resolved between cherished ideals and economic goals; and the revitalization of an economic, industrial, and social system supposedly pronounced dead. Owning the workers created unique possibilities for very long-term personnel planning: he could train talented adolescents for posts they would hold for twenty or thirty years. Like many other forward-thinking planters, Jefferson would reimagine an old, widely maligned system to make it fit into a modernizing nation while preserving the values, outlook, and structure of an extremely conservative society.
Nation-building on two fronts, Jefferson put in place his program for modernizing slavery at home while serving as President Washington’s secretary of state. He retired from that post in 1793 to devote his full attention to Monticello but returned to the political fray in 1796 to campaign for the presidency against John Adams. Coming in second, he became vice president in 1797 but continued to manage Monticello from afar.
Jefferson had received an astonishing welcome in 1789 when he arrived home at Monticello from France. He had directed his manager, Nicholas Lewis, to extract “extraordinary exertions” of labor from the slaves to stay current with his debt payments. Some slaves had endured years of harsh treatment at the hands of strangers, for to raise cash, Jefferson had also instructed Lewis to hire out slaves.* He demanded extraordinary exertions from the elderly: “The negroes too old to be hired, could they not make a good profit by cultivating cotton?”1 For the five years Jefferson had been gone, Lewis had struggled just to keep the people fed and clothed on farms going to ruin. So when word spread that the owner was returning at last, the slaves welcomed him as a savior. They unhitched the horses from his carriage and pulled it up the mountain themselves:
When the door of the carriage was opened, they received him in their arms and bore him to the house, crowding around and kissing his hands and feet—some blubbering and crying—others laughing. It seemed impossible to satisfy their anxiety to touch and kiss the very earth which bore him…. perhaps it is not out of place here to add that they were at all times very devoted in their attachment to him.2
This event might seem to bolster the idea that slaves were, as Jefferson said, like children. His biographer Dumas Malone wrote: “To their simple minds it seemed that he had come home to stay, and he must have thought it good to be there—though he did not like to be the master of slaves.”3 But Jefferson observed that when you thrust people into poverty, you reduce them to “passive obedience.” 4
Jefferson had assured the French that emancipation was “gaining daily recruits” among younger Americans, and he may have had his own daughter in mind. In a note to her father in 1787, Patsy had expressed ardent abolitionist sentiments. Hearing that a boatload of slaves might be delivered to Virginia, she wrote: “Good god have we not enough? I wish with all my soul that the poor negroes were all freed.”5 But her abolitionism receded when she suddenly needed a dowry.
Within days of arriving from France, Patsy ran into a distant cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph, whom she had known in childhood. Within weeks the cousins announced their engagement, and they married at Monticello on February 23, 1790. Patsy was seventeen and Thomas Mann Randolph, later known as Colonel Randolph, was twenty-one. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Jefferson and Randolph’s father hastily negotiated a marriage settlement. The senior Randolph (also named Thomas Mann Randolph) bestowed on the couple a 950-acre plantation with livestock and forty slaves. But on close examination, the plantation turned out to be a very dubious “gift,” for it came with a $2,900 mortgage. Alarmed at the onerous debt, Jefferson urged his future son-in-law to refuse the gift.6
Jefferson wanted Randolph to refuse the gift for another reason. The plantation, called Varina, lay near Richmond, ninety miles from Monticello, and Jefferson did not want his daughter living so far away. Nor did Patsy wish to leave her father’s orbit.7 Not even marriage weakened her attachment to her father. When Jefferson later wrote to Patsy of his plans to return to Monticello after a long absence, she replied that this news stirred in her “raptures and palpitations not to be described.”8
After very difficult and protracted negotiations Jefferson persuaded the elder Randolph to sell young Randolph his Edgehill plantation, situated in a lovely valley just a few miles north, with a view of Monticello. This transaction took two years to complete. In the meantime, the newlyweds settled into Monticello itself. And with gifts of slaves, Jefferson set up Patsy’s household to emulate his. For her personal attendant he gave her a Hemings—thirteen-year-old Molly, the daughter of Mary Hemings; for a cook he gave her Suck, the wife of his lifelong enslaved companion Jupiter. Though divided ownership put Jupiter’s family at risk of permanent separation, Jefferson would not have seen these gifts as sundering black nuclear families but as consolidating the larger plantation “family.”
That was the genteel face of the slave system; next he turned to the business side. The transfer of household servants might have been a sufficiently generous wedding gift, but Jefferson could see that young Tom Randolph, saddled with the Varina debt, was bankrupt on arrival. And the elder Randolph, a widower forty-nine years old, was about to marry a nineteen-year-old maiden only two years older than one of her stepdaughters-to-be. (She quickly produced another male heir, whom the patriarch named Thomas Mann Randolph III, in an act of apparent paternal hostility toward Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.) In light of this looming December-May marriage, the elder Randolph’s “gift” might be more accurately characterized as a clearing of the books: he unloaded a debt onto his son, with a farm attached.
Concerned “to place them in security,” Jefferson promised to give his daughter one of his “best” properties and “25 negroes little and big.”9 The legal document solemnizing the “Marriage Settlement for Martha Jefferson” transferred a farm called Wingo’s, a one-thousand-acre part of the Poplar Forest plantation some ninety miles southwest of Monticello, and twenty-seven slaves. At every level this was a family transaction. The Wingo’s community consisted of five families with children, nine of them under the age of ten, and a couple. The Wingo’s families were very closely related, having lived in isolation on the plantation for decades. Slaves named Tom and Billy were married to the sisters Sarah and Lucy, whose father, Lundy, also lived on the place, as did Tom’s parents and Tom’s brother Jeffery. These slaves formed Patsy’s safety net, for Jefferson put the land and slaves in her name alone, giving her a layer of protection if Colonel Randolph ran into financial problems. And he augmented this gift with a twenty-eight-year-old slave woman and her four small children, all younger than ten.
Ownership of a critical mass of black people provided financial stability to an upper-class family, and Jefferson could not launch his daughter into marriage without “that capital which a growing family had a right to expect.”10 As Jefferson expected, Colonel Randolph repeatedly encountered financial difficulties and sold or mortgaged slaves to cover his shortfalls.
The image of slaves carrying Jefferson into his mansion is apt. They had been carrying him for years, and they had no notion of how valuable they really were. Labor was so costly and sought-after in Virginia that Jefferson’s manager had been able to match the plantation’s agricultural income by hiring out slaves while Jefferson was in Paris. Jefferson’s eye had caught this profit in the accounts; he had written to Lewis in 1786: “Would it be better to hire more?”11
Again and again the sale, the hiring, or the mortgaging of black souls rescued the Jeffersons from a bad harvest, bought time from the debt collectors, and kept the family afloat while a new and grander version of Monticello took shape. Meanwhile, Jefferson embarked on other costly projects he could not afford without slave labor. Yet Jefferson, his children, and his grandchildren forever referred to these slaves as a burden, and historians have sympathetically echoed their complaints, writing that Jefferson was “trapped” or “entangled” in a system he hated.
The slaves formed Jefferson’s bulwark against catastrophe. While he was in France, he ordered the sale of 31 people, from which he netted £2,300. He sold another 30 slaves in 1791, 13 more in 1792, and 9 in the next two years. “Finding it necessary to sell a few more slaves to [pay down] the debt of mr Wayles…I have thought of disposing of Dinah & her family,” he wrote to his brother.12 Between 1784 and 1794 he sold or gave away 160 people. But the community constantly replenished itself. In 1792 he calculated that the births of slave children produced capital at the rate of 4 percent per year: “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.” In the 1780s and 1790s the astounding total of 143 children were born into Jefferson’s possession.
Jefferson had recrossed the ocean to Virginia with blueprints for the future of Monticello in his head, along with a startlingly modern business model. The economy was changing and he adapted. His vision for Monticello’s future depended on slaves in new ways.
Actually, Jefferson had recrossed the ocean with a real blueprint—his design for an ingenious new plow blade “of least resistance” that cut and turned the earth more efficiently, requiring less force than the plows he had studied in Europe.13 Simple in its design, the blade could be fabricated on the farm “by the coarsest workman.” With this tool, “mathematically demonstrated to be perfect,” he would remake his farming enterprise. “The plough is to the farmer what the wand is to the sorcerer. Its effect is really like sorcery.”14
A species of sorcery is what he had in mind. We still hear it said that because tobacco was creating a ruined landscape of washed-out gullies, slavery would have died off peacefully if Eli Whitney had not invented his cotton gin and made fresh work for millions of enslaved black hands. But before the reign of King Cotton there was the regency of Prince Wheat. Jefferson arrived in Virginia with a plan to shift away from growing tobacco, whose cultivation he described as “a culture of infinite wretchedness.” Tobacco wore out the soil so fast that new acreage constantly had to be cleared, engrossing so much land that food could not be raised to feed the workers, requiring planters to purchase rations for the slaves.15
The cultivation of wheat revitalized the plantation economy and reshaped the South’s agricultural landscape. Planters all over the Chesapeake region had been making the shift. (George Washington had begun raising grains some thirty years earlier because his land wore out faster than Jefferson’s did.) Jefferson continued to plant some tobacco because it remained an important cash crop, but his vision for wheat farming was rapturous: “The cultivation of wheat is the reverse [of tobacco] in every circumstance. Besides cloathing the earth with herbage, and preserving its fertility, it feeds the labourers plentifully, requires from them only a moderate toil, except in the season of harvest, raises great numbers of animals for food and service, and diffuses plenty and happiness among the whole.”
The machine age had arrived, promising a transformation of agriculture, and Jefferson took a keen interest in the latest innovations. In August 1791, while serving as George Washington’s secretary of state, he visited a farm outside Philadelphia to inspect a newly invented threshing machine (the president went with him for a look).16 Later in that decade he ordered models of several different designs, which he then modified himself, eventually putting three machines into operation at Monticello. Outside contractors built the machines, but he depended on slaves to operate and repair them, and that was the keystone of the new plantation system.
Wheat farming forced changes in the relationship between planter and slave. Tobacco was raised by gangs of slaves all doing the same repetitive, backbreaking tasks under the direct, strict supervision of overseers. Wheat required a variety of skilled laborers, and Jefferson’s ambitious plans required a retrained workforce. When his slaves greeted him on his return, he saw not a mob of “simple minds” but a promising flock of potential millers, mechanics, carpenters, smiths, spinners, coopers, and plowmen and plow-women.
Jefferson still needed a cohort of “labourers in the ground” to carry out the hardest tasks, so the Monticello slave community became more segmented and hierarchical. They were all slaves, but some slaves would be better than others. The majority remained laborers; above them were enslaved artisans (both male and female); above them were enslaved managers; above them was the household staff. The higher you stood in the hierarchy, the better clothes and food you got; you also lived literally on a higher plane, closer to the mountaintop. A small minority of slaves received pay, profit sharing, or what Jefferson called “gratuities,” while the lowest workers received only the barest rations and clothing. Difference bred resentment, especially toward the elite household staff.
Planting wheat required fewer workers than tobacco, leaving a pool of field laborers available for specialized training. Jefferson embarked on a comprehensive program to modernize slavery, diversify it, and industrialize it. Monticello would have a nail factory, a textile factory, a short-lived tinsmithing operation, coopering, and charcoal-burning. He had ambitious plans for the mill and a canal to provide water-power for it.
Training for this new organization began in childhood. Jefferson sketched out a plan in his Farm Book:
children till 10. years old to serve as nurses.
from 10. to 16. the boys make nails, the girls spin.
at 16. go into the ground or learn trades.17
Measuring and counting everything, Jefferson devised numerous expedients for saving money and labor and for maximizing productivity. He determined, for example, that he could feed the slaves on dried fish for half the cost of pork: “a barrel of fish, costing 7.D. goes as far with the laborers as 200. lb of pork 14.D.” He laid out housing to save labor: “Build the Negro houses near together that the fewer nurses may serve & that the children may be more easily attended to by the super-annuated women.”18 He put old people and the partially infirm to work, referring to the crew of gardeners as his “senile corps.” He exulted that his successful textile factory “only employs a few women, children and invalids who could do little in the farm.” He had a very broad definition of “invalids”: on the one hand, he specified that they should “work only when they are able,” but on the other hand he thought that “they will probably be equal to the hauling away the earth and forming it into a bank on the side next the river.”19
Tobacco required child labor (their small stature made children ideal workers for the distasteful task of plucking and killing tobacco worms); wheat did not, so Jefferson transferred his surplus of young workers to his nail factory (boys) and spinning and weaving operations (girls). He launched the nailery in 1794 and supervised it personally for three years. “I now employ a dozen little boys from 10. to 16. years of age, overlooking all the details of their business myself.”20 He said he spent half the day counting and measuring nails. In the morning he weighed and distributed nailrod to each nailer; at the end of the day he weighed the finished product and noted how much rod had been wasted.
The nailery “particularly suited me,” he wrote, “because it would employ a parcel of boys who would otherwise be idle.”21 Equally important, it served as a training and testing ground. All the nail boys got extra food; those who did well received a new suit of clothes, and they could also expect to graduate, as it were, to training as artisans rather than going “in the ground” as common field slaves. Some nail boys rose in the plantation hierarchy to become house servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, or coopers. Wormley Hughes, a slave who became head gardener, started in the nailery, as did Burwell Colbert, who rose to become the mansion’s butler and Jefferson’s personal attendant.22 Isaac Granger was the most productive nailer, with a profit averaging eighty cents a day over the first six months of 1796, when he was twenty; he fashioned half a ton of nails during those six months. The work was tedious in the extreme. Confined for long hours in the hot, smoky workshop, the boys hammered out five to ten thousand nails a day, producing a gross income of $2,000 in 1796. Jefferson’s competition for the nailery was the state penitentiary.23
The nailers received twice the food ration of a field worker but no wages. Jefferson paid white boys (an overseer’s sons) fifty cents a day for cutting wood to feed the nailery’s fires, but this was a weekend job done “on Saturdays, when they were not in school.” Jefferson’s grandchildren sometimes pitched in, as the overseer wrote, and worked with them “like little Turks on Saturdays, so that my boys could go with them a-fishing.”24
Exuberant over the success of the nailery, Jefferson wrote: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.”25 The profit was substantial. Just months after the factory began operation, he wrote that “a nailery which I have established with my own negro boys now provides completely for the maintenance of my family.”26 Two months of labor by the nail boys paid the entire annual grocery bill for the white family. He wrote to a Richmond merchant, “My groceries come to between 4. and 500 Dollars a year, taken and paid for quarterly. The best resource of quarterly paiment in my power is Nails, of which I make enough every fortnight to pay a quarter’s bill [emphasis added].”27 The success of the nail factory spurred him to develop other enterprises staffed by skilled slaves that brought in cash or made Monticello more self-sufficient.
He wrote out a plan for a harvest involving a small army of sixty-six laborers. His enslaved manager and blacksmith, Great George Granger, would ride behind the harvesters “with tools & a grindstone mounted in the single mule cart…constantly employed in mending cradles & grinding scythes. The same cart would carry about the liquor…. cradlers should work constantly.” Five of the “smallest boys” would be the gatherers, supervised by a “foreman,” who was one of the larger boys. Women and “abler boys” would bind the sheaves. There would be stackers, loaders, cooks, and carters; “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.” He estimated that this force, fueled by four gallons of whiskey, would complete a harvest in six days.28
A foreign visitor in 1796, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, observed this human machine in operation and was deeply impressed. “I found him in the midst of the harvest from which the scorching heat of the sun does not prevent his attendance,” wrote the duke, who noted Jefferson’s all-encompassing attentiveness to plantation management: “He orders, directs and pursues, in the minutest detail, every branch of business.”29
Sharing Jefferson’s passion for innovative, scientific agriculture, the duke inspected the plantation with a practiced eye, noting with approval the treatment of the workers—“His negroes are nourished, clothed, and treated as well as white servants could be”—and observing with some astonishment that the blacks had mastered a multiplicity of skills: as “cabinet-makers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc.” He could not restrain his excitement.
The exhilaration in the duke’s account arises from his perception that a breakthrough had been achieved in a remarkably short time. He could see no trace of the racial inferiority Jefferson had described in Notes. The enslaved, who Jefferson had said in France were as simple and useless as children, were skilled, diligent workers motivated “by rewards and distinctions.” So the question inevitably arose: Is this the moment to set the people free?
Apparently not. The duke dutifully reports to his European readers Jefferson’s good intentions: “The generous and enlightened Mr. Jefferson cannot but demonstrate a desire to see these Negroes emancipated.”30 But then there is the thud of disappointment. In a tone of some bafflement La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt tries to explain why the demonstrable skills and good character of the enslaved are not sufficient, in Jefferson’s view, to gain them freedom: “He sees so many difficulties in their emancipation [and] he adds so many conditions to render it practicable, that it is thus reduced to the impossible.” Jefferson is determined to police the color line: “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 mixed without means of preventing it.”
At this point an air of unreality settles over the scene, for the race-mixing Jefferson claims to dread has already taken place. La Rochefoucauld could see for himself that Jefferson had staffed his household with mixed-race slaves “who have neither in their color nor features a single trace of their [African] origin.”31
The people of Monticello had more than fulfilled the conditions Jefferson had set down in a letter written in 1791 to the black mathematician-astronomer Benjamin Banneker:
No body wishes more than I do to see [proof] that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men…. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be.32
The roster of skills acquired by the Monticello slaves is remarkable. Historians have compiled a list of their occupations: plowmen and plow-women, gardeners, shepherds, millers, charcoal burners, sawyers, carpenters, joiners, cabinetmakers, wheelwrights, carriage makers, coopers, basket makers, blacksmiths, nail makers, tinsmiths, spinners, weavers, dyers, seamstresses and tailors, shoemakers, brickmakers and bricklayers, stonecutters and stonemasons, glaziers, plasterers, painters, roofers, launderers, cooks, dairy workers, brewers, soap makers, candlemakers, butlers, barbers and hairdressers, maids and valets, midwives, coachmen, hostlers, wagoners, and watermen.
The conversation of the duke and the Founder on that blazing June day at Monticello is an archetypal scene in Southern life—the visit to a plantation by an outsider who gazes and listens in increasing bafflement as the evidence of his eyes is contradicted by what he is told. Here Jefferson takes on the part of a universal figure—the master called upon to explain a central mystery of American life. With the diligence and skill of the slaves fully evident, Jefferson explains that despite what you see, these people are degraded and different and they have no place in our country. He establishes that slavery is mysterious, that on this borderland of races the master alone comprehends the processes taking place: dangerous primal struggles despite the apparent tranquillity.
Arguing with such a man was futile. Tossing up so many difficulties, so many conditions, the master trumps the outsider with his esoteric knowledge of the race mystery. But like the duke, we must take a close, interrogating look at the systems Jefferson put into operation on his mountain. Indeed, there were processes invisible to the duke.
The people gathering the sheaves and sharpening the scythes in the hot sun of a Virginia afternoon were soon to be owned in Amsterdam. Jefferson was conducting negotiations with a Dutch merchant-banking house to finance the recapitalization of Monticello’s operations and the construction of its new mansion. The people La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt watched at work were about to become bundled and collateralized assets in an international banking transaction.
The deal was finalized in the solemn legal language of “Witnesseth” in a financial instrument between Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle in Virginia on the one part and Nicholas Van Staphorst, Jacob Van Staphorst, and Hubbard of Amsterdam in the United Netherlands, merchants and partner:
whereas the said Van Staphorsts & Hubbard have now lately and since the dates of the said deeds lent to the said Thomas the further sum of two thousand dollars…he hath given granted and conveyed unto the said Nicholas and Jacob Van Staphorsts & Hubbard all his right and equity of redemption in the said hundred and fifty negro slaves in full and absolute right and dominion.33
In his approach to the Dutch bankers, with whom he had had dealings in Europe, Jefferson reported that his estate was “much deteriorated” after his absences but that “an advance of from one to two thousand dollars would produce a state of productiveness.”34 Determined to fight off his debts, Jefferson bought time by selling people, and then he realized he could take on debt to expand, to acquire new machinery and erect a new house. He showed the plans to La Rochefoucauld, who thought “his house will certainly deserve to be ranked with the most pleasant mansions in France and England.”35 The Dutch bankers opened an equity line backed by Jefferson’s slaves for $2,000.36
It was around this time that Jefferson chided a neighbor who had suffered financial losses, saying he “should have been invested in negroes,” and urged the neighbor’s family to invest “every farthing” of their available cash “in land and negroes, which…bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.” The slaves had condemned themselves: the more skilled they became, the more valuable they became, and the more they tightened the chains of their enslavement.37 With the machine functioning in equilibrium, the owner would never dismantle it. Jefferson had also calculated that it was vastly cheaper to feed, house, and clothe a slave than hire a free white worker, if he could find one.38 Yet when questioned by an outsider about freeing slaves, a master never said they are too valuable; it was much easier to say they are like children.
The duke was present at a transitional moment in American history. Like many other planters in the South, Jefferson was trying to devise a “rational and humane” plan not to end slavery but to reshape it and bring it into the new republic as an acceptable, indeed respectable component of the economy and society. This is what slaveholders called “amelioration.” Traveling through the Chesapeake country at about this time, the Irishman Isaac Weld noted that slaveholders “have nearly everything they can want on their own estates. Amongst their slaves are found tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, turners, wheelwrights, weavers, tanners, etc.”39 Mainly a business plan, amelioration included a psychological component—persuading slaves that it was rational and humane for them to be enslaved. This is what Jefferson, Washington, and the other revolutionaries had most feared that the British would do to the white people of America: persuade them or trick them into submitting to a form of slavery that had invisible chains.40
The psychological underpinning of amelioration might be found, perversely, in the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s sources for it. Jefferson wrote of a fearful apparition, the sufferable evil, a concept he derived from John Locke’s observation that people “are more disposed to suffer than right themselves by resistance.” Jefferson re-wrote this in the Declaration as, “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The ameliorated version of slavery looks very much like the sufferable evil Jefferson warned of, clothed in “prevarications and artifices” masking a design to reduce the people “under absolute Despotism.” 41
The slaveholders were fashioning a transition from the system of slavery they had inherited, which Jefferson portrayed as a burdensome legacy bequeathed by the dead hand of the past, to a new, refined system of deliberate enslavement. With Virginia’s liberal manumission law of 1782 still on the books, owners could free their people at will, but that law was quietly gathering dust, a vestige of Revolutionary fervor now burning out. Very few planters relinquished their slaves, as Jefferson had predicted in Notes: “Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power they possess.”
Another outsider rose up. As if from the grave of the Revolution, a stalwart veteran of the cause, the Polish general Thaddeus Kosciuszko, called upon Jefferson for help in composing a last will and testament. The memory of what he had fought for was on his mind. Leaving America for Europe in 1798 to take up the cause of Polish independence, Kosciuszko wished to ensure that the long-delayed payment he had just received for his Revolutionary service in the American uniform would be put to a revolutionary use. Kosciuszko’s command of English was not perfect, so he asked Jefferson, in whom he had complete faith, to sit down with him to compose a will that would stand up in an American court. In preparation, Kosciuszko drafted the following document in his own hand, in imperfect English. It reads like a farewell address to America and Jefferson:
I beg Mr. Jefferson that in case I should die without will or testament he should bye out of my money so many Negroes and free them, that the [remaining] Sums should be sufficient to give them education and provide for their maintenance. that is to say each should know before, the duty of a cytysen in the free Government. that he must defend his Country against foreign as well internal Enemies…. to have good and human heart sensible for the sufferings of others. each must be married and have 100 ackres of land, wyth instruments. Catle for tillage, and know how to manage and Gouvern it as well as how to behave to neybourghs. always with kindness and ready to help them. Themselves frugal, to their Children give good education. I mean as to the heart and the duty to their Country.42
Kosciuszko had one request to make of the people he expected to free: “in gratitude to me to make themselves hapy as possible.”
The word to which every writer on slavery must eventually resort is “irony.” When Jefferson had gone to inspect the new threshing machine near Philadelphia, George Washington went with him. One irony is that Washington was turning in his mind plans for freeing his slaves, which he would eventually do in his will after his family had thwarted his earlier effort. On the issue of slavery, Jefferson emerges poorly in a side-by-side moral comparison with Washington, but in hindsight we can see which Founder more truly reflects the times and the character of the country. The public would little note, and did not long remember, Washington’s emancipation of his slaves. In hindsight, George Washington’s “inflexible” sense of justice and insistence on “a common bond of principle” seem antique, as dull and disapproving as his portrait on the dollar, when set beside the ingenuity, vision, and entrepreneurial energy on full display at Monticello. The future belonged to Jefferson.