Throughout Jefferson’s plantation records there runs a thread of indicators—some direct, some oblique, some euphemistic—that the Monticello machine operated on carefully calibrated violence. Some people would never readily submit to being slaves. Some people, Jefferson wrote, “require a vigour of discipline to make them do reasonable work.”1 That plain statement of his policy has been largely ignored in preference to Jefferson’s well-known self-exoneration: “I love industry and abhor severity.”2 Jefferson made that reassuring remark to a neighbor, but he might as well have been talking to himself. He hated conflict, disliked having to punish people, and found ways to distance himself from the violence his system required. He was the owner, but nothing was his fault. Thus he went on record with a denunciation of overseers as “the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race,” men of “pride, insolence and spirit of domination.”3 Though he despised these brutes, they were hardhanded men who got things done and had no misgivings. He hired them, issued orders to impose a vigor of discipline, and then spread a fog of denial over the whole business.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had denounced violence against slaves, which he had good reason to hate because he had seen too much of it. A woman named Hannah, whom Jefferson knew, was beaten to death in “a cruel whipping” by an overseer at his brother’s plantation.4 He wrote the vivid description in Notes of someone, probably his father, beating a slave. As a boy, he witnessed other scenes he did not describe; the historian Susan Kern has found an advertisement taken out by Jefferson’s father for a runaway named Robin who “had on his Neck when he went away an Iron Collar.”5 A modern reader might think this was some item of adornment, but the collar was very different. A Civil War soldier described one of these infernal devices, which he removed from a man’s neck: “On either side of the collar was riveted a spike about four inches long, so arranged that one of the spikes stuck up behind each ear, and held the head as in a vice. Any attempt to turn the head ever so slightly resulted in a prod from one of these spikes.”6
Small wonder that Jefferson called slavery “unremitting despotism,” having witnessed his father’s overseer, or his father himself, collaring a slave. But from his post in France, Jefferson ordered his manager to elicit “extraordinary exertions,” and the manager’s expense accounts in 1791 include a line item for the purchase of “collars.”7
In the first decade of his ownership of Monticello, Jefferson leased farms for three years to Thomas Garth, whom he characterized as “excessively severe.” When Garth’s lease expired in 1775, Jefferson nevertheless hired him as overseer of all his holdings in Albemarle County. Garth set a standard of cruelty Jefferson did not want to see matched: when he evaluated potential overseers some thirty years later, he rejected one candidate because the man “has been brought up in the school of the Garths…his severity puts him out of the question.”8
From 1790 until 1803, Colonel Randolph acted as Monticello’s “executive overseer,” supervising a series of overseers when Jefferson’s public duties took him away from Monticello for months at a time. Like George Washington, Jefferson ran a country and a plantation simultaneously. Both issued highly detailed orders from a distance to their plantation managers. Both possessed virtually photographic memories of their properties by the square foot, held agricultural calendars in their heads, and could summon clear mental images of the work that needed to be done, precisely where and how it needed to be done, and by whom. Both felt seized by anxiety that as they labored in the capital for the public good, their personal substance was draining away at home. Both commanded their managers to maintain production.
When Nicholas Lewis left Monticello in 1792, Jefferson and Colonel Randolph exchanged letters about choosing his replacement. Their discussion suggests that both men knew that harsh treatment had been the standard under Lewis’s command and that they hoped for improvement. Randolph proposed hiring a man named Manoah Clarkson because he thought he combined “Goodness” with “firmness and vigor.” After Clarkson had worked for a while, Randolph reported, “The skill and activity of Clarkson are sufficiently manifested allready to make us hope that your affairs in Albemarle will be better conducted than they have ever been. I know it will give you real pleasure to hear that he has a valuable art of governing the slaves which sets aside the necessity of punishment allmost entirely. Contentment reigns among them.”9 Jefferson shared Randolph’s optimism: “Your account of Clarkson’s conduct gives me great pleasure.”10
In his response to Randolph, Jefferson also wrote, “My first wish is that the labourers may be well treated.”11 But what appears at first glance to be an ironclad declaration of principle turns out to be just what Jefferson said it was, a “wish,” and it was qualified by a second wish—“that they may enable me to have that treatment continued by making as much as will admit it.”
This seemingly simple statement contains an enormous amount of information. First, this was Jefferson’s contract with the slaves: I wish to treat you well, but if you do not produce enough, there will be harsh measures. As with his earlier unspoken compacts, the slaves had no idea that this governing principle had been declared, although they could certainly sense its effects.
Second, it was Jefferson’s contract with himself. Having made this mental compact with the slaves, he could absolve himself from blame for anything unpleasant. The slaves were at fault.
Third, we get a flickering, on-and-off sighting of Jefferson the man. The benevolent paterfamilias is dominant, but in the background stands a darker figure, harder to discern, emerging only briefly in flares of wrath, which we instinctively discount because it does not fit with the image we want to have.
Fourth, these were standing orders to the hapless son-in-law charged with managing the unmanageable—barely controllable overseers and laborers who resisted control. The heir of ruinous debts, Randolph depended on Jefferson’s largesse to survive, and his wife was utterly devoted to her father. Randolph had no explicit authority over the overseers, but he was the owner’s son-in-law; Jefferson told the overseers to ask him for advice, but Randolph should not intervene except in “extremities.”
Randolph’s letters, generally a model of clarity and erudition (he attended college in Edinburgh), sometimes degenerate to gibberish when he is forced to discuss the disciplining of slaves with his father-in-law, as if he were stammering in front of the commander in chief. In a garbled sentence that takes several readings to untangle, Randolph described his peculiar position as middleman in a chain of command as tangled as his syntax: “I have been frequently called on and have not hezitated to interfere tho’ without authority I have made known to all I had none that my interference if not productive of wholesome effects might be rejected.”
One letter to Jefferson abruptly opens with a declaration of loyalty and then an ambiguous hint that some overseer, unnamed, has crossed the line into severity, what Randolph calls euphemistically “strict command.” Randolph would like to put a stop to something unspecified, but he thinks that strict command (“the motives upon which you depended”) is what his father-in-law wants, and a change in policy presents risks. Oblique and obscure, the account apparently made sense both to Randolph and to Jefferson: “I am confident I could have served you considerably but I thought it better to trust to the motives upon which you depended than risk the consequences of a sudden relaxation of strict command.”12
A point-counterpoint runs through Randolph’s reports to Jefferson in the winter of 1798, when output sagged at the precise moment when Jefferson was urging speed. Jefferson had sent instructions that “George should be hurried to get his tobacco down. I have never learned whether he & Page have delivered all their wheat & how much.”13 This was the season in which the enslaved foreman Great George Granger faced insubordination and wasted away with care because he was too lenient, while the harsh regime of the “terror” William Page provoked “discontent.” Randolph told Jefferson that Page was “peevish & too ready to strike.”14 But Jefferson had known Page’s temperament when he hired him and had taken the precaution of removing Granger’s son Bagwell and his family from the farm Page would manage; he had a cabin hastily constructed for them on the Monticello farm, where Bagwell would be under his father’s supervision.15 When he received the report of insubordination under one manager and discontent under the other, Jefferson loftily advised Randolph that “George needs to be supported & Page to be moderated,” but offered no advice on how that might be achieved, and later remarked, vaguely, “I am in hopes that Page & George will give you but little trouble.”16 In any event, output had to be maintained; he had his eye on delivery dates to the Richmond market.
“I am not fit to be a farmer with the kind of labour we have,” Jefferson exclaimed in 1799, in an oft-quoted diatribe against the uselessness of slaves, suggesting a heroic struggle on his part to wring productivity out of them.17 He was chief scribe in the propaganda war against African-American laborers. Despite their difficulties, Granger and Page managed to produce an excellent crop of tobacco, which Jefferson had resumed planting. Several years earlier he had exulted: “We have had the finest harvest ever known in this country. Both the quantity and quality of wheat are extraordinary.”18 He had the slaves to thank for this, the weather to blame for other problems—drought and frost destroyed the next wheat crop—and only himself to blame for the setback that inspired his outburst against the laborers. As one historian discovered, “Although the American economy was in trouble in 1798, Jefferson had a particularly good year, selling his tobacco in Richmond for $13 a hundred weight.”19 He did so well that he was able to pay off $2,000 in back debts and, because the economy was slack, to hire, at a bargain rate, a top-quality house joiner in Philadelphia, James Dinsmore, who went on to complete Monticello. He also bought his daughter a Kirchmann harpsichord, one of the finest and most expensive brands.
In 1799 he had plenty of tobacco to sell, but he bet against the market, holding back from selling in the certainty that commodity prices would rise. The market fell. By the time he decided to sell, he got only $6 a hundredweight. And when he wrote his blast against the slaves and their useless labor, the market was in free fall—not their fault, but someone had to take the blame for his embarrassment and bear the burden of repairing the damage wrought by a ruthless market.
The physical punishment of slaves presented a potential embarrassment to the plantation world and to Jefferson. When a British poet wanted to mock Jefferson, he composed a verse saying, “The patriot…retires to lash his slaves at home.” During his presidency Jefferson received an anonymous letter about a report circulating in Washington that he had been seen at Monticello personally lashing a female slave. The charge was most likely baseless, but even the hint of such an incident could stain Jefferson’s reputation.20
Among themselves, the planters expected and accepted a certain level of violence, but there were limits. When the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt visited Monticello, he learned of a commotion among the planters about a heinous act by one of their own:
I witnessed the indignation excited in all the planters of the neighborhood by the cruel conduct of a master to his slave, whom he had flogged to such a degree as to leave him almost dead on the spot. Justice pursues this barbarous master, and all the other planters declared loudly their wish, that he may be severely punished, which seems not to admit of any doubt.21
Jefferson’s man William Page evoked the same disgust. His methods of control at Jefferson’s farms unnerved the whole county. In the judgment of Albemarle’s white citizens, Page was a “terror.” Though Colonel Randolph told Jefferson about the slaves’ “discontent” with Page’s free use of the lash, Jefferson retained the peevish overseer’s services for another two years.22 Jefferson’s other son-in-law, John Wayles Eppes, alluded to “the publick sentiment against him.” Making his own deal with the devil, Eppes hired Page, balancing the overseer’s known cruelty against “his skill and industry.” But when Eppes sought to hire slaves from other Albemarle planters, nobody would do business with him: “the terror of Page’s name…prevented the possibility of hiring them.”23
A year after he hired Manoah Clarkson, Jefferson’s estimate of that overseer’s goodness had been deflated, though not to the degree that he would fire the man: “I shall perhaps propose [a project] to Clarkson…unless I could find a person more kind to the labourers.”24 Jefferson hired another violent overseer with an “unfortunate temper,” William McGehee—“to those under him he is harsh, severe and tyrannical,” so tyrannical that when McGehee was working on another plantation he had to carry a gun “for fear of an attack from the negroes.”25
In the 1950s a tiny fragment of information about the Monticello system so shocked one of Jefferson’s editors that he suppressed it in the record. The standard source for our understanding of life at Monticello has been the edition of Jefferson’s Farm Book edited in the early 1950s by Edwin Betts, with a five-hundred-page compendium of letters and other documents describing in minute detail the day-to-day lives of master and slaves. When Betts was editing one of Colonel Randolph’s plantation reports, he confronted a taboo subject: Randolph reported to Jefferson that the nailery was functioning very well because “the small ones” were being whipped. Being ten, eleven, or twelve years old, they did not take willingly to being forced to show up in the icy midwinter hour before dawn at the master’s nail forge. And so the overseer, Gabriel Lilly, was whipping them “for truancy.”26
Betts decided that the image of children being beaten at Monticello had to be suppressed, so he deleted the offending line from Randolph’s letter. He had an entirely different image in his head; the introduction to the book declared, “Jefferson came close to creating on his own plantations the ideal rural community.”27 Betts couldn’t do anything about the original letter, but no one would see it, tucked away in the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The full text did not emerge in print until 2005.
Betts’s omission was important in shaping the scholarly consensus that Jefferson managed his plantations with a lenient hand. Relying on Betts’s editing, the historian Jack McLaughlin noted that Lilly “resorted to the whip during Jefferson’s absence, but Jefferson put a stop to it.”28 “Slavery was an evil he had to live with,” Merrill Peterson wrote, “and he managed it with what little dosings of humanity a diabolical system permitted.”29 Peterson echoed Jefferson’s complaints about the workforce, alluding to “the slackness of slave labor,” and emphasized Jefferson’s benevolence: “In the management of his slaves Jefferson encouraged diligence but was instinctively too lenient to demand it. By all accounts he was a kind and generous master. His conviction of the injustice of the institution strengthened his sense of obligation toward its victims.”30 Joseph Ellis observed that only “on rare occasions, and as a last resort, he ordered overseers to use the lash.” Dumas Malone stated, “Jefferson was kind to his servants to the point of indulgence, and within the framework of an institution he disliked he saw that they were well provided for. His ‘people’ were devoted to him.”31
As a rule, the slaves who lived at the mountaintop, including the Hemings family and the Grangers, were treated better than the slaves who worked in the ground farther down the mountain. But the machine was hard to restrain.
After the violent tenures of earlier overseers, Gabriel Lilly seemed to portend a gentler reign when he arrived at Monticello in 1800. Colonel Randolph’s first report was optimistic. “All goes well,” he wrote, and “what is under Lillie admirably.”32 His second report about two weeks later was glowing: “Lillie goes on with great spirit and complete quiet at Mont’o.: he is so good tempered that he can get twice as much done without the smallest discontent as some with the hardest driving possible.”33 In addition to placing him over the laborers “in the ground” at Monticello, Jefferson put Lilly in charge of the nailery for an extra fee of £10 a year.
Once Lilly established himself, his good temper evidently evaporated, because Jefferson began to worry about what Lilly would do to the nailers, the promising adolescents whom Jefferson managed personally, intending to move them up the plantation ladder. He wrote to Randolph: “I forgot to ask the favor of you to speak to Lilly as to the treatment of the nailers. it would destroy their value in my estimation to degrade them in their own eyes by the whip. this therefore must not be resorted to but in extremities. as they will again be under my government, I would chuse they should retain the stimulus of character.” But in the same letter he emphasized that output must be maintained: “I hope Lilly keeps the small nailers engaged so as to supply our customers.”34
Colonel Randolph immediately dispatched a reassuring but carefully worded reply: “Everything goes well at Mont’o.—the Nailers all [at] work and executing well some heavy orders…. I had given a charge of lenity respecting all: (Burwell* absolutely excepted from the whip alltogether) before you wrote: none have incurred it but the small ones for truancy.”35 To the news that the small ones were being whipped and that “lenity” had an elastic meaning, Jefferson had no response; the small ones had to be kept “engaged.”
It seems that Jefferson grew uneasy about Lilly’s regime at the nailery. Jefferson replaced him with William Stewart but kept Lilly in charge of the adult crews building his mill and canal. Under Stewart’s lenient command (greatly softened by habitual drinking), the nailery’s productivity sank. The nail boys, favored or not, had to be brought to heel. In a very unusual letter, Jefferson told James Dinsmore that he was bringing Lilly back to the nailery. It might seem puzzling that Jefferson would feel compelled to explain a personnel decision that had nothing to do with Dinsmore, but the nailery stood just a few steps from Dinsmore’s shop. Jefferson was preparing Dinsmore to witness scenes under Lilly’s command such as he had not seen under Stewart’s, and his tone is stern: “I am quite at a loss about the nailboys remaining with mr Stewart. they have long been a dead expence instead of profit to me. in truth they require a vigour of discipline to make them do reasonable work, to which he cannot bring himself. on the whole I think it will be best for them also to be removed to mr Lilly’s [control].”36
An incident of horrible violence in the nailery—an attack by one nail boy against another—may shed some light on the fear Lilly instilled in the nail boys. In 1803 a nailer named Cary smashed his hammer into the skull of a fellow nailer, Brown Colbert. Seized with convulsions, Colbert went into a coma and would certainly have died had Colonel Randolph not immediately summoned a physician, who performed brain surgery. With a trephine saw, the doctor drew back the broken part of Colbert’s skull, thus relieving pressure on the brain. Amazingly, the young man survived.
Bad enough that Cary had so viciously attacked someone, but his victim was a Hemings. Jefferson angrily wrote to Randolph that “it will be necessary for me to make an example of him in terrorem to others, in order to maintain the police so rigorously necessary among the nail boys.”* He ordered that Cary be sold away “so distant as never more to be heard of among us. It would to the others be as if he were put out of the way by death.” And he alluded to the abyss beyond the gates of Monticello into which people could be flung: “There are generally negro purchasers from Georgia passing about the state.”
Randolph’s report of the incident included Cary’s motive: the boy was “irritated at some little trick from Brown, who hid part of his nailrod to teaze him.” But under Lilly’s regime this trick was not so “little.” Colbert knew the rules, and he knew very well that if Cary couldn’t find his nailrod, he would fall behind, and under Lilly that meant a beating. Hence the furious attack.37
Jefferson’s daughter wrote to her father that one of the slaves, a disobedient and disruptive man named John, tried to poison Lilly, perhaps hoping to kill him. John was safe from any severe punishment because he was a hired slave: if Lilly injured him, Jefferson would have to compensate his owner, so Lilly had no means to retaliate. John, evidently grasping the extent of his immunity, took every opportunity to undermine and provoke him, even “cutting up [Lilly’s] garden [and] destroying his things.”38
But Lilly had his own kind of immunity. He grasped his importance to Jefferson when he renegotiated his contract, so that beginning in 1804 he would no longer receive a flat fee for managing the nailery but be paid 2 percent of the gross.39 Productivity immediately soared. In the spring of 1804, Jefferson wrote to his supplier: “The manager of my nailery had so increased its activity as to call for a larger supply of rod…than had heretofore been necessary.” 40
Maintaining a high level of activity required a commensurate level of discipline. Thus, in the fall of 1804, when Lilly was informed that one of the nail boys was sick, he would have none of it. Appalled by what happened next, one of Monticello’s white workmen, a carpenter named James Oldham, informed Jefferson of “the Barbarity that [Lilly] made use of with Little Jimmy.” Oldham reported that James Hemings, the seventeen-year-old son of the house servant Critta Hemings, had been sick for three nights running, so sick that Oldham feared the boy might not live. He took Hemings into his own room to keep watch over him. When he told Lilly that Hemings was seriously ill, Lilly said he would whip Jimmy into working. Oldham “begged him not to punish him,” but “this had no effect.” The “Barbarity” ensued: Lilly “whipped him three times in one day, and the boy was really not able to raise his hand to his head.” 41
Flogging to this degree does not persuade someone to work; it disables him. But it also sends a message to the other slaves, especially those, like Jimmy, who belonged to the elite class of Hemings servants and might think they were above the authority of Gabriel Lilly. Once he recovered, Jimmy Hemings fled Monticello, joining the community of free blacks and runaways who made a living as boatmen on the James River, floating up and down between Richmond and obscure backwater villages. Contacting Hemings through Oldham, Jefferson tried to persuade him to come home but did not set the slave catchers after him.42
There is no record that Jefferson made any remonstrance against Lilly, who was unrepentant about the beating and the loss of a valuable slave; indeed, he demanded that his salary be doubled to £100. This put Jefferson in a quandary. He displayed no misgivings about the regime that Oldham characterized as “the most cruel,” but £100 was more than he wanted to pay. Jefferson wrote that Lilly as an overseer “is as good a one as can be”—“certainly I can never get a man who fulfills my purposes better than he does.” 43
Years of watching people get whipped did not accustom Colonel Randolph to it. Rather, he grew to hate it. He banned the whip on his own place, Edgehill; and when people committed a serious offense, he took them to court, and they were punished by a stint in jail, like a white person. Occasionally, he took a cane to people, but there was something about the whip he could no longer abide, it being the emblem of a species of power no one should have because, he wrote, “power seldom reasons well”—a Jeffersonian notion if there ever was one. He evidently had words with his fellow planters over the question of whipping and the realpolitik of plantation management. Someone must have said to him: Well, they whip people in the army, and this is the same. Colonel Randolph didn’t think so. He had seen army discipline, and he wrote: “Tyranny in the army is mitigated by the reflexion that the brave have to submit to the brave only,” whereas on a plantation “the greatest dastard” held people “entirely in his power, and dependent upon his caprice.” 44
Jefferson wrote that punishment degraded slaves “in their own eyes,” which made whipping counterproductive because it would “destroy their value.” 45 He was referring not to the laborers in the ground but to the high-ranking artisans and household servants. His new model of agriculture and industry required a measure of self-reliance (very carefully limited) on the part of these exceptionally important people. Jefferson wanted them to display “character,” but that emphatically did not mean having a sense of self-worth or self-esteem. Possessing “character” meant that you were manageable. The nailers “will again be under my government” when he returned to Monticello, and he wanted to deal with contented slaves. He certainly did not want to involve himself in any unpleasant business of punishment.
If slaves could be convinced that it was in their interest to cooperate, to be good slaves, then Jefferson would not have them collared or whipped, and slavery would be a less distasteful business for everyone. This was part of Jefferson’s sinister fantasy that he was a benevolent master—sinister because he believed that by manipulating behavior with threats and rewards, he could get inside a person’s head and shape the “character.” He could make slavery congenial to the master by creating genial slaves suited to perpetual slavery. Alexis de Tocqueville later observed this process taking place across the South, writing that the slaveholders “have employed their despotism and their violence against the human mind.” 46
Benjamin Franklin, of all people, sketched out a remarkably calculating, cold program for manipulating people into internalizing their enslavement: “Every master of slaves ought to know, that though all the slave possesses is the property of the master, [the slave’s] good-will is his own, he bestows it where he pleases; and it is of some importance to the master’s profit, if he can obtain that good-will at the cheap rate of a few kind words, with fair and gentle usage.” 47 Kindness, fairness, and gentleness—core human values—became useful tools for enslavement.
Jefferson’s system took advantage of people rooted in old ways, who clung to conventions of loyalty and gratitude. They were tightly bound to him, and their interests intersected. Everyone cherished order. For the owner, maintenance of order kept the enterprise productive. For the slaves, order kept them alive and kept their families together. They absorbed whatever evil was done to them because something worse could always happen.* 48
The superficial tranquillity of the plantation world helped to give the impression that the slaves had willingly accepted their enslavement. But Colonel Randolph knew that this was not a tranquil world but a desperate one. The man who hanged himself on the neighboring plantation had been, according to him, a slave who possessed “character,” which had not been enough to save him, and Randolph genuinely mourned the loss of this person fatally engulfed in the “sooty atmosphere” of the regime. From what he wrote, it seems that Randolph must have known the man well, because the letter stares deeply into a soul tormented by fear. His “character” sprang from terror.
The man was “the most trust-worthy among them…being the one chosen to go on the road with the wagon always, to hand off grain and bring back supplies”; but his trustworthiness grew from a dread of being whipped. He had “seriously formed the resolution never to incur the punishment of stripes, by any misconduct.” But “for some trifling misdemeanour”—people said the man had left tools behind in the field—“the young fellow received a few lashes, on his bare back.” And so, that night, “he hung himself, 30 feet from the ground, in a tree near his Masters door.” Randolph did not see this as the act of a coward: “The bravery of this fellow seems to have left no room in his mind for [the thought of running away]. He had made a resolution, and he marched intrepidly forward in the execution of it, despising pain, and not knowing fear.” 49 The system that could kill such a man was merely “a hideous monster” behind a cheap mask of “a few kind words…fair and gentle usage.”
“Their griefs are transient,” Jefferson wrote, suggesting that the enslaved, inside, were very nearly dead. He saw African-Americans as “a captive nation,” and his system was carefully designed, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, to “teach peace to the conquered.”50