310 History class

16

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical”

At its extreme edge American idealism, with its relentless pursuit of justice, induces a kind of giddiness. A petition that a group of abolition­ ists submitted to Congress during Jefferson’s presidency noted that while ‘‘cruelties and horrors” beset Europe, “a beneficent and overruling Providence has been pleased to preserve for our country the blessings of peace, to grant us new proofs of his goodness, and to place us in a condition of prosperity, unrivalled in the records of history.” Surely, they went on, a reciprocal obligation is imposed: a “nation so crowned with the blessings of peace, and plenty, and happiness” must “manifest its gratitude ... by acts of justice and virtue.”1 One such act unfolded in the following manner.

On the first day of April in 1819 a group of seventeen slaves left a plantation in the mountains south of Charlottesville, not far from Mon­ ticello, bound for a distant destination. They had been forbidden to carry much baggage and been told they could only take items they would need on a journey. A black man, a fellow slave, was in charge of them. It was not at all unusual for slave drivers to be black men, and this caravan would not have excited much notice at a time when the roads of Virginia were full of “gangs of Negroes, some in irons,” on their various melancholy ways to slave markets. This group of five adults and twelve children had not been told where they were going.2

Riding in wagons, the slaves headed west across the Blue Ridge, then turned north to follow the Great Wagon Road up the Valley of Virginia. Along the way, a white man galloped up to check on the party’s progress.

234 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

He was their master, a wealthy, politically prominent Virginian. Several of the slaves were ill, which delayed the party, so the owner rode ahead. In Maryland the wagons turned west along the National Road (today’s Route 40), reaching the Monongahela River after a trek of some 280 miles.

The master had arrived at the Monongahela ahead of his slaves, and there he purchased two flat-bottomed boats, sixty feet long and twelve feet wide, on which the party embarked. Because his slaves were all mountain people who knew nothing of boats, the owner hired a river pilot but had to put him off at Pittsburgh because the man was con­ stantly drunk. At Pittsburgh the Monongahela joins the Ohio River, the great water route to the West and a dividing line between slavery and freedom. On its left bank lay Virginia and then Kentucky, slave states, while on the right stretched the shores of Ohio, which was free.

As the master later remembered, the landscape seemed extraordi­ narily beautiful that April under a bright sun and cloudless sky, with the pale green foliage of spring emerging on the banks as they floated gently past. Altogether, it was “a scene ... in harmony with the finest feelings of our nature,” as he later wrote in a memoir.

The master deliberately chose this stunning panorama as the back- drop to reveal their destination. He ordered the boats lashed together, assembled the people, and "made them a short address”: “I proclaimed in the shortest & fullest manner possible, that they were no longer Slaves, but free—free as I was, & were at liberty to proceed with me, or to go ashore at their pleasure.”

The master later wrote that “the effect on them was electrical.” The people stared at him and then at each other, “as if doubting the accu­ racy or reality of what they heard.” A profound silence settled upon them. Then, as they slowly grasped the truth of what they had heard, they began to laugh—-“a kind of hysterical, giggling laugh”—and then to cry, and then fell again into silence. “After a pause of intense and unutterable emotion, bathed in tears, and with tremulous voices, they gave vent to their gratitude and implored the blessing of God.”

The owner had a further announcement. He said that in recom­ pense for their past services to him, upon their arrival at their destina­ tion, the free state of Illinois, he would give each head of a family 160 acres of land. He would settle near them. To the gift of land, “all

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical” 235

objected, saying I had done enough for them in giving them their free­ dom,” insisting they would happily delay their emancipation and remain his slaves until they had comfortably established him in his new home. But the master refused the offer. He said that he had “thought much of my duty & of their rights” and “had made up my mind to restore to them their immediate & unconditional freedom; that I had long been anxious to do it.” Indeed, when the party reached Illinois, “I executed & delivered to them Deeds to the land promised them.”

Along with their freedom and the gift of land, a heavy burden was about to descend on the freed people, the master remarked, and so he availed himself “of the deck scene to give the Negroes some advice.” He expressed

a great anxiety that they should behave themselves and do well, not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of the black race held in bondage; many of whom were thus held, because their masters believed they were incompetent to take care of them­ selves, & that liberty would be to them a curse rather than a blessing. My anxious wish was that they would so conduct them­ selves, as to show by their example, that the descendants of Af­ rica were competent to take care of & govern themselves, & enjoy all the blessings of liberty, & all the other birthrights of man; & thus promote the universal emancipation of that unfor­ tunate & outraged race of the human family.

The emancipator was Edward Coles, a thirty-two-year-old member of a very prominent Virginia family. Dolley Madison was his cousin, and among the Virginians whom the Coles family counted as friends and patrons were Patrick Henry, James Monroe, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.

In the massive landscape of slavery, the emancipation of seventeen people may not seem like a significant event. But its symbolism was and is enormous. Coles’s emancipation of these slaves was regarded as a cor­ nerstone of the foundation of Illinois. A painting of the event on the river hangs in the capitol rotunda in Springfield, titled Future Governor Edward Coles Freeing His Slaves While Enroute to Illinois 1819. In 1822, Coles ran for governor of the state (it was only the second gubernatorial

236 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

election there) specifically to beat back attempts to make Illinois a slave state, and he narrowly won.

The event is also significant because it was preceded by a debate between Coles and Thomas Jefferson about freeing the enslaved peo­ ple. Jefferson told Coles not to do it, but Coles was determined to give up slave-owning “whatever might be the sacrifices of pecuniary interest, or personal convenience.” The difficulties and sacrifices it required were, he declared, nothing but “dust in the balance when weighing the consolation and happiness of doing what you believe right.”3 In the twilit Jeffersonian moral universe, Coles’s act blazes and reminds us what American idealism looks like.

Coles had concluded that slavery had to be eradicated when he was a student at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson’s alma mater. One of his professors was the Episcopal bishop James Madison (second cousin of the future president). As Coles wrote in a memoir:

I can never forget [Bishop Madison’s] peculiarly embarrassed manner, when lecturing & explaining the rights of man, I asked him, in the simplicity of youth, & under the influence of the new light just shed on me—if this be true how can you hold a slave— how can man be made the property of man? He frankly admit­ ted it could not be rightfully done, & that Slavery was a state of things that could not be justified on principle, & could only be tolerated in our Country, by . . . the difficulty of getting rid of it.

These arguments failed to impress Coles, who had imbibed what Jefferson called “the gas of liberty.” Coles said, “I do not believe that man can have a right of property in his fellow man, but on the contrary, that all mankind are endowed by nature with equal rights.”4 At every oppor­ tunity he peppered the bishop with ethical queries worthy of the Stoa of the Athenians, or the dining room of Monticello:

Was it right to do what we believed to be wrong, because our forefathers did it? They may have thought they were doing right, & their conduct may have been consistent with their ideas of propriety. Far different is the character of our conduct, if we be­ lieve we do wrong to do what our forefathers did. As to the diffi­

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical” 237

culty of getting rid of our slaves, we could get rid of them with much less difficulty than we did the King of our forefathers. Such inconsistency on our part, & such injustice to our fellow­ man, should not be tolerated because it would be inconvenient or difficult to terminate. We should not be deterred by such consid­ erations, & continue to do wrong because wrong had been done in times past; nor ought a man to attempt to excuse himself for doing what he believed wrong, because other men thought it right.

Above all Coles believed in the responsibility of the individual. If you had principles, you had to act by them. Rather than following “the will of the majority,” the individual must obey “what he believed to be the will of God, and felt to be the dictates of right deeply implanted in his nature.”

As he persisted in his debates with the bishop-professor, Coles found that “in theory” the bishop agreed with him, “but I could not convince him he was bound to carry out his theory, & to act up to his principles, by giving freedom to his Slaves.” Bishop Madison looked to the legislature to abolish slavery, as did Jefferson. George Washington expressed the same wish for years, until, weary of waiting for the politi­ cal climate to change, he decided to defy convention and act on his own to free his slaves.

Coles agreed that he too would prefer a general emancipation sanc­ tioned by the state, but if the people of Virginia

neglected to do their duty, & tolerated a state of things which was in direct violation of their great fundamental doctrines, I could not reconcile it to my conscience & sense of propriety to participate in it; and being unable to screen my self under such a shelter, from the peltings & upbraidings of my own conscience, and the just censure, as I conceived, of earth & heaven, I could not consent to hold as property what I had no right to.5

He kept his intentions secret because he had not yet received title to the slaves allotted to him, and he believed that if his father discovered his intentions, he would not pass title to the slaves.6 But as soon as his

238 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

father died, Coles told his family of his intention to free his slaves. They argued against the “folly of throwing away property which was neces­ sary to my comforts, and which my parents all their lives had been la­ bouring to acquire.” How would he support himself?

Despite the objections of his family, Coles said his resolution re­ mained “fixed & unalterable”: his “aversion to living in the midst and witnessing the horrors of slavery” compelled him to action. Deeply re­ luctant to leave his home and family, he considered remaining in Vir­ ginia and freeing his slaves on his home ground, retaining them as paid free laborers.7 But his friends were “indignant” at the very idea of it, ominously warning that both he and his freed slaves “would be consid­ ered and treated as pests of society, and every effort made to persecute, to injure, and to extirpate us.”8

Edward’s brother Isaac had served as President Jefferson’s private secretary, and on Isaac’s recommendation Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, offered Edward that post in 1809. Eager to put his emancipa­ tion plan into action immediately, Coles agonized over accepting the president’s offer and decided to reject it so that he could the more quickly free his slaves. Riding into Charlottesville to post his letter turning down the offer, Coles encountered James Monroe, who urged him to accept the job, which, he argued, would familiarize him with the leaders of the western states and provide the necessary background information for an emancipation. Monroe told Coles that “it was particu­ larly desirable that I should associate with non-slaveholding people,” whose “habits & customs were so different” from what he had been ac­ customed to in Virginia, with its “peculiar state of society.” (It is inter­ esting that Monroe believed not only that slave and non-slave societies were very different but that it was Virginia that was “peculiar.”)9 At Mon­ roe’s urging, Coles took the post, and he later went to Russia as Presi­ dent Madison’s special envoy to Tsar Alexander I.

In Madison’s White House, Coles felt the giddy sense of luxury at the crest of American society, “the ease and self indulgence of being waited on . . . the luxuries of the table &c &c, in which children are usu­ ally brought up by the rich planters of the Southern states, had been . . . increased and confirmed as a habit in me, by a residence of more than five years in the family of the President of the United States.” First at home, and then at the White House, Coles said, he received a “double

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical” 239

schooling” in the “great & protracted indulgence in the highest walks of ease and luxury in this Country.” Later, when he lived without servants, the memory of that ease and luxury “made me feel more sensibly my diminished means of living, & especially the want of being waited on.”10

Travelers remarked on the laziness slavery induced in white people of all classes. In his American Geography the New England clergyman and geographer Jedidiah Morse noted the “dissipation of manners [that] is the fruit of indolence and luxury, which are the fruit of the African slavery.”11 Conversing with “the indolent masters” of Virginia, the French journalist Brissot de Warville heard all their reasons for the impossibil­ ity of freeing slaves: “they fear that if the Blacks become free, they will cause trouble; on rendering them free, they know not what rank to as­ sign them in society; whether they shall establish them in a separate district, or send them out of the country. These are the objections which you will hear repeated every where against the idea of freeing them.” Brissot de Warville regarded all of this as a tissue of rationalizations, believing that the real obstacle was “the character, the manners and habits of the Virginians. They seem to enjoy the sweat of slaves. They are fond of hunting; they love the display of luxury, and disdain the idea of labour.”12

Coles’s service to Madison only strengthened his determination to carry out an emancipation. Riding through the capital, on numerous occasions President Madison and Coles passed coffies of slaves chained up for the auction block or for the dreaded journey farther south. Coles had the nerve to needle the president on his luck that no foreigners happened to be riding with them: “I have taken the liberty to jeer him, by congratulating him, as the Chief of our great Republic, that he was not then accompanyed by a Foreign Minister, & thus saved the deep mortification of witnessing such a revolting sight in the presence of the representative of a nation, less boastful perhaps of its regard for the rights of man, but more observant of them.”13

While working at the White House, Coles turned his thoughts to his deferred emancipation plan and decided to recruit an ally, a renowned advocate of liberty who would certainly lend his support, Thomas Jef­ ferson. In July 1814, Coles took up his pen with “hesitation” and “em­ barrassment” to call Jefferson’s attention to “a subject of such magnitude, and so beset with difficulties ... a general emancipation of the slaves of

240 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

Virginia." Expressing "the highest opinion of your goodness and liberal­ ity,” Coles quickly came to his point: “My object is to entreat and be­ seech you to exert your knowledge and influence in devising and getting into operation some plan for the gradual emancipation of slavery.”

Referring to Jefferson as one of “the revered fathers of all our politi­ cal and social blessings” and extolling the “valor, wisdom and virtue [that] have done so much in ameliorating the condition of mankind,” Coles then sharpened his pen and thrust it straight at the Founder: “it is a duty, as I conceive, that devolves particularly on you, to put into complete practice those hallowed principles contained in that renowned Declaration, of which you were the immortal author, and on which we founded our right to resist oppression and establish our freedom and independence.”

Coles did not ask Jefferson to free his slaves immediately, but to formulate a general emancipation plan for Virginia and lay it before the public, backed by his immense prestige. Referring to Jefferson’s “great powers of mind and influence,” Coles urged him to put forth a plan “to liberate one-half of our fellow beings from an ignominious bondage to the other.”14

Jefferson put him off. Although slavery presented “a moral reproach to us” and “the love of justice and the love of country” demanded emancipation, he could detect no "serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral & political reproba­ tion.”15

Jefferson said he was waiting for signs of “progress of public sentiment”—signs of slave owners (there was no other “public”) chang­ ing their minds. “I had always hoped that the younger generation . . . would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it,” he wrote, though he had in his hands a letter from a member of the younger generation. He insisted that the right moment had not yet arrived because progress “has not been sufficient.” He soothed Coles about the delay: “Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come.” Rejecting the idea that individuals should act on their own, he opined that the only way to bring about emancipation was for the legislature to set a date after which all slaves born in Virginia would be trained to take care of themselves—and then be exiled.

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical” 241

Emancipation, he went on, required "a gradual extinction of that spe­ cies of labour & substitution of another, [to] lessen the severity of the shock which an operation so fundamental cannot fail to produce.” The shock, he thought, would be felt both by the Virginia economy and by the freed people. He repeated language he had used twenty-five years earlier: “Brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or fore­ cast, [black people] are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young. In the mean time they are pests in society by their idleness, and the depredations to which this leads them.”

He understood why Coles had approached him “as the person who should undertake this salutary but arduous work,” but he insisted he was too old. “This enterprise is for the young. ... It shall have all my prayers, & these are the only weapons of an old man.” He urged Coles not to leave Virginia but to “reconcile yourself to your country and its unfortunate condition” and to work "softly but steadily” to bring about the day of emancipation:

come forward in the public councils, become the missionary of this doctrine truly Christian; insinuate & inculcate it softly but steadily, through the medium of writing and conversation; asso­ ciate others in your labors, and when the phalanx is formed, bring on and press the proposition perseveringly until its accom­ plishment. . . . And you will be supported by the religious pre­ cept, “be not weary in well-doing.”*

Believing in the unique capacity of a great leader, Coles wrote to Jefferson again, insisting that he was one of “the only persons who have it in their power effectually to arouse and enlighten the public senti­ ment, which in matters of this kind ought not to be expected to lead, but to be led.” Coles agreed that the public was sunk in apathy and

^Jefferson’s startling assemblage of Christian aphorisms in this letter—“It shall have all my prayers”; "become the missionary of this doctrine truly Christian”; "be not weary in well-doing”— is striking because Coles made no religious references in his initial letter but, rather, a thor­ oughly secular appeal based on justice and human rights. Possibly, Jefferson had heard from James Madison that Coles was religious, and Jefferson thought Coles could be deflected by im­ ages of Christian patience.

242 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

inertia, weighted by “habit and interest.” It could be jolted from its stu­ por only by someone such as Jefferson, someone who possessed “a great weight of character, and on whom there devolves in this case a most solemn obligation.” To Jefferson’s protest that he was too old to take up the cause, Coles riposted: “Your time of life I had not considered as an obstacle to the undertaking. Doctor Franklin, to whom, by the way, Pennsylvania owes her early riddance of the evils of slavery, was as ac­ tively and as usefully employed on as arduous duties after he had past your age as he had ever been at any period of his life.”*16

*Nor was Jefferson too old to take up the arduous, years-long task of establishing the University of Virginia, an accomplishment he put on his tombstone.

That was the end of the correspondence. The revolutionary refused to take up the torch, and Coles turned his thoughts to Illinois.

Several years earlier Jefferson had received another powerful and prac­ tical appeal to join in an emancipation “experiment” from his former pri­ vate secretary in Paris, William Short, whom Jefferson called his “adoptive son.” Sixteen years younger than Jefferson, Short attended William and Mary, where he studied law under George Wythe as Jefferson had. Short was one of the founders of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and one of Amer­ ica’s early millionaires. His father left him a substantial inheritance, which he invested shrewdly in land, canals, and, later, railroads. A rela­ tive of Jefferson’s wife, he had been a guest at Monticello in the 1770s and 1780s, including the day in 1781 when British raiders ascended the mountain and nearly captured the Founder and when the Jefferson fam­ ily fled to Poplar Forest. He was at Poplar Forest during the weeks when Jefferson worked on his Notes on the State of Virginia—a significant coin­ cidence. For almost certainly Jefferson discussed his ideas, including his racial theories, with Short.

Jefferson noticed that his protégé possessed “a peculiar talent for prying into facts.” In 1788 in France, Short visited a château that Jeffer­ son had also visited, and commented on the labor system that had struck Jefferson as a possible replacement for American slavery—the métayage, or sharecropping, system. In two letters written to Jefferson five years apart, in 1793 and 1798—long after Jefferson had returned to

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical” 243

America but when Short was still in Europe—Short turned Notes on the State of Virginia around, deploying Jefferson’s Enlightenment lan­ guage in that book to demolish Jefferson’s “suspicions” about black infe­ riority and racial mixing.

In 1793 he seized on a passing remark Jefferson had made in their correspondence—“We are beginning in Virginia to think of tenanting our lands”—and used it as the opening gambit for a discussion of mé­ tayage and freeing slaves. He asked Jefferson if “by tenanting you mean that humane and philanthropic system of [renting farms] to the slaves.” This was what Jefferson had indeed proposed in 1789 when he told Edward Bancroft of his plan to settle some of his slaves on farms along­ side German immigrants. Jefferson had not carried out that plan, but Short contemplated doing it himself:

I think those who have the misfortune to own slaves, should for the sake of humanity make the experiment. When I shall return to America it is my intention to preach this not only by precept but by example—and for this purpose I intend purchasing a small number—it is a subject my mind goes much on—I have already formed the rules to be observed for exciting in these people the idea of property and the desire to acquire it, which I think would be easily done.

Acting as Short’s agent, which he did for the many years when Short lived in Europe, in 1795 Jefferson purchased a thirteen-hundred-acre plantation near Monticello called Indian Camp, later known as Mor­ ven.* Short approached the moral problem of slavery as a businessman would, with a free-market approach—“exciting in these people the idea of property and the desire to acquire it.” He did not share Jefferson’s racial views; indeed, he thought he saw signs of “the perfectibility of the black race” and believed that slaves could, given the chance, work their way out of slavery. For him, the notion of turning slaves into free ten­ ants “seems ... to unite the very ideas which are formed to give the

"It was sold in 1813 to a merchant who renamed it Morven. In 1988, Morven became the resi­ dence of John Kluge, for a time the wealthiest person in the United States. In 2001 he be­ queathed the property to the University of Virginia.

244 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

most heartfelt satisfaction to a pure and virtuous mind—viz. an union of the purest principles of humanity with the prosperity of one’s country.”

Short was convinced that owners would make more money from renting land to free blacks than from compelling enslaved blacks to work the same acres. He told Jefferson that if a few owners were to try the experiment, keep careful track of their expenses and profits, and publish the results in the newspapers, slaveholders would see that it was in their financial interest to free their slaves. He emphasized the profit motive: “The only way to bring men ... to desire an event is to show that they have an interest in it. I wish the slaveholders to be at­ tacked by proofs that their interest would not suffer.” He expected such an undertaking to encounter difficulties, but they would be overcome: “Whatever may be the result of the first essays, time & repetition will I think infallibly shew the advantage of free, above forced, labor.”

The historian Billy Wayson, a close student of the financial dealings between Jefferson and Short, sees the latter as an important transi­ tional figure. Old-line Virginians measured wealth in land, slaves, and honor; Short expresses the emerging mode of capitalism. And it was the capitalist in this pair who argued for using the free market and incen­ tives to end slavery in Virginia.17

Like Coles, Short believed in the power of a leader, suggesting that someone of Jefferson’s talent and stature could get the experiment started: “Let the enlightened & virtuous citizens, who toil for public instruction, turn the public mind towards this subject, & endeavour to demonstrate that the owners of slaves would gain in point of interest by the change.” His letter combined an appeal to Jefferson’s Enlighten­ ment principles with a large dose of flattery. He wrote of “a penetrating genius capable of diving into the bosom of futurity”; he said that “this great & momentous object, the transformation of 700,000 slaves into free citizens, [required] the talents of the statesman, the philosopher, the philanthrope, in short all who have any regard to the interests of their country or the rights of humanity.” His syntax suggests numerous peo­ ple, but he knew that Jefferson saw himself as the combination of all those personae.

Short proposed an eminently workable plan for freeing the slaves who were “the most industrious & most ripe for liberty”—allow one day

The Effect on Them Was Electrical 245

of the week, “or any other portion of their time,” in which the slaves could earn money to purchase themselves.18 Short suggested that the Virginia legislature could pass a law requiring owners to try this plan. He did not say it, but the implication was clear that Jefferson could put this program in place on his own at Monticello. Jefferson made no reply.

Having lived with Jefferson in Paris, Short had gotten to know Sally Hernings and may well have been aware of Jefferson’s relationship with her when he boldly attacked Jefferson’s core objection to emancipation— his professed aversion to miscegenation. In a startling discourse on the beauty of racial mixture, Short compared the loveliness that could be attained by racial mingling to “the perfect mixture of the rose & the lilly.” If black people were set free, he foresaw a “gradual mixture” with the happy result that “all of our Southern inhabitants should advance to the middle ground between their present color & the black.” The ex­ traordinary word in that sentence is “advance”—a direct challenge to Jefferson’s contention that mixing degraded his race. To this also, Jef­ ferson made no reply.

As Edward Coles was making final preparations for his trek to Illinois in the early months of 1819, Jefferson actually had in hand the means to free some Monticello slaves and send them to new lives under Coles’s leadership. His old friend the Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kościuszko had died in 1817, leaving the will that bequeathed Jefferson funds to free his slaves and purchase land and farming equipment for them to begin a life on their own. In the spring of 1819, Jefferson pon­ dered what to do about this bequest. Kościuszko had made him executor of the will, so Jefferson had a legal duty, as well as a personal obligation to his deceased friend, to carry out the terms of the document*

^Jefferson asked his friend General John Hartwell Cocke, the owner of Bremo plantation in nearby Fluvanna County, to take over the execution of the will, but Cocke declined.

These terms came as no surprise to Jefferson. He had helped Koś­ ciuszko draft the will, which states, “I hereby authorize my friend, Thomas Jefferson, to employ the whole [bequest] in purchasing Ne­ groes from his own or any others and giving them liberty in my name.”

246 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

Kosciuszko’s estate had grown to nearly $20,000, and this money was Jefferson’s for the taking. But he refused it, even though it would have relieved the debt hanging over him while also relieving him, in part at least, of the “moral reproach” of slavery.19

Coles, Kościuszko, and William Short all saw the appalling corrup­ tion of slavery and its burgeoning power. The only force that could turn the tide was, they believed, the sacred, incorruptible idealism of the Revolution. A leader wielding that instrument could conquer any evil— and so they turned to Jefferson. “All mankind are endowed by nature with equal rights,” Coles wrote to Jefferson. No one knew this language better than Jefferson—indeed, he had helped to create it—and he re­ plied to Coles, in kind, that "the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast, & had become as it were the vital spirit of every Ameri­ can.” But note the past-perfect tense: he was evoking a Revolutionary spirit that had come and gone. His supplicants did not realize how much Jefferson had changed.

If Jefferson had accepted Kosciuszko’s bequest, as much as half of it would have gone not to Jefferson but, in effect, to his slaves—to the purchase price for land, livestock, equipment, and transportation to get them started in a place such as Illinois or Ohio. Moreover, the slaves most suited for immediate emancipation—smiths, coopers, carpenters, the most skilled farmers—were the very ones whom Jefferson most wanted to keep. He also shrank from any public identification with the cause of emancipation.

As U.S. minister to France in the 1780s, Jefferson had begun to see slave labor as the most powerful and most convenient engine of the American enterprise. With a class of slaves, the United States could produce the commodities (tobacco and rice) needed to pay down the country’s debt to Great Britain. And then in the next decade, on his home ground, Jefferson began to perceive the pure financial value of owning slaves. Farming would always be a species of "gambling,” in his memorable image, but the ownership of slaves, and the existence of a robust secondary market for slaves, provided not only a safety net but an investment opportunity.

We have seen how he worked out his 4 percent formula—the annual increase in the value of his slaveholdings. It had long been ac­

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical 247

cepted that slaves were assets that could be seized for debt, but Jefferson turned this around when he used slaves as collateral for that very large loan he took out from the Dutch banking house in order to rebuild Monticello. He pioneered the monetizing of slaves, just as he pioneered the industrialization and diversification of slavery with his nailery, tex­ tile factory, coopering shop, short-lived tinsmithing business, and grist­ mill. Far from regarding slaves as childlike and incompetent, he realized they were highly amenable to training in specialized skills, and he put into effect a long-term program to staff his plantation with skilled people for decades. He took the 1789 emancipation plan he had outlined in Paris—which would train slaves to prepare them for citizenship—and turned it on its head.

Nevertheless, Jefferson’s reputation as an emancipator has remained more or less intact. "No Virginian (and probably no American) did more than Thomas Jefferson to oppose slavery,” writes Robert Turner of the University of Virginia School of Law.20 This belief that he was a frus­ trated emancipator rests in large part on the letters he wrote to progres­ sives who questioned him about emancipation—or at any rate on the snippets from these letters that have received wide circulation thanks to the modern publication of Jefferson’s papers. Many of them have been compiled on the Monticello website under the rubric “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation.” Beautifully composed, in stirring, evocative prose, the letters make inspiring reading.

The language of these letters is remarkably uniform from the 1780s to his death in 1826, and remarkably similar to the conversation Jeffer­ son had with the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt at Monticello in 1796. Jefferson forcefully states his personal commitment to the ideal of emancipation; in the online compendium he mentions his will­ ingness to sacrifice anything for emancipation in four different docu­ ments. He states his concern for the welfare of his slaves while saying that the black people remain incompetent. He alludes to the horror of racial mixing. Whenever someone presents him with evidence of intelligence and achievement among black people, he dismisses the evidence.

In replying to Coles, Jefferson reached far back into the past, re­ peating the old rumor from the 1770s that a Quaker experiment in free­ ing slaves had failed miserably, that the Quakers “had set free a parcel of lazy, worthless negroes.”21 In fact, the Quaker emancipation and many

248 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

others just like it in Delaware and Maryland had been extremely successful, but Jefferson continued to circulate the useful fiction that blacks “are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” The historian William W. Freehling writes that in Delaware and Maryland “black freedmen formed an orderly working class,” but in the minds of Jefferson and other slaveholders “the phe­ nomenon of orderly free blacks could not happen and therefore had not happened.”22

When Jefferson walked around Philadelphia in company with Koś­ ciuszko in the 1790s, he encountered a thriving class of free black Americans. As the historian Richard Newman writes: “A census of the free black community conducted by Pennsylvania abolitionists in 1790 . . . found stable black families, hard-working people of color, and a desire among free blacks and newly liberated enslaved people to mas­ ter both literacy and marketable skills.”23 As we have seen, at Monti­ cello he had mechanics capable of building him a carriage, capable of comprehending and making real his designs for woodwork (which he adjudged the finest in the country), skilled at smithing, painting, glaz­ ing, coopering, and so on. His cooks, trained at the White House by French professionals, could easily have made a living as free people. Moreover, these skills were all the more valuable to him, as to all Vir­ ginia’s planters, because white artisans were so scarce, so costly, and so often drunk. According to one estimate, by the mid-nineteenth century about 80 percent of Virginia’s artisans were enslaved or free blacks.24 Nothing could be more convenient than owning an entire community of skilled working people. Having seen all this with his own eyes, Jef­ ferson continued to speak of the “imbecility” of blacks.25

In his letters and in his conversations Jefferson blamed slavery on the slaves. On an 1807 visit to Monticello a British diplomat, Augustus John Foster, was treated to a disquisition on African-American stu­ pidity:

He told me, also, that the Negroes have, in general, so little fore­ sight that though they receive blankets very thankfully from their masters on the commencement of winter and use them to keep off the cold, yet when the warm weather returns they will frequently cast them off, without a thought as to what may be­

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical” 249

come of them, wherever they may happen to be at the time, and then not seldom lose them in the woods or the fields from mere carelessness.26

In fact, the slaves had no blankets, because Jefferson’s overseers had not distributed any. In a memorandum to a new overseer, a year before the diplomat’s visit, Jefferson wrote, “I allow them a best striped blanket every three years. Mr. Lilly had failed in this; but the last year Mr. Free­ man gave blankets to one-third of them.”27 Jefferson knew one thing to be true but said another to a credulous outsider.

In one instance, Jefferson admitted to a friend that a response he had given to a French progressive was not entirely honest. In the sum­ mer of 1808, Henri Grégoire, bishop of Blois, sent Jefferson a copy of his new book, De la littérature des Nègres, later translated into English as An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes. As its title implies, Gregoire’s Enquiry sought to discredit the notion of black inferiority through a survey of literary achievements. Jefferson responded fulsomely:

Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself enter­ tained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on par with ourselves. . . . On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respect­ able intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief.

But to a friend who also knew Grégoire, Jefferson said that he was ut­ terly unimpressed by the anthology, which was the product, he thought, of the bishop’s “credulity,” which was why, he added, “I wrote him ... a very soft answer.”28

Jefferson claimed he was waiting to find what he called a “natural aristocrat” among the blacks, a scholar such as himself. When candidates

250 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

did present themselves—the poet Phillis Wheatley and the mathemati­ cian Benjamin Banneker—Jefferson dismissed and derided their achievements. In Notes he had advanced the idea that black people were “in reason much inferior" because he had never known of a black person “capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” But when Coles went to Illinois, he took enslaved farmers and made them yeomen; Kościuszko had farmers in mind. Neither looked for Euclidean scholars.

Always, Jefferson told his supplicants to look toward the future with hope. The day of emancipation was coming. It would arrive when white people experienced “a revolution in public opinion,” as he wrote to yet another correspondent who brought up emancipation. But in an 1805 letter to an intimate, his private secretary, William Burwell, he wrote, “I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us.”29 The governments of all the South­ ern states were in the hands of slaveholders whose sense of justice and morality was defined not by the soaring language of the Revolution but by their pocketbooks. Among this class, Jefferson said to Burwell, “inter­ est is morality.” As a senator from Georgia declared: “You cannot prevent slavery—neither laws moral or human can do it. Men will be governed by their interest, not the law.”30

Around the time that Coles was struggling to settle his freed people in Illinois, Jefferson wrote to a congressman expressing sentiments that Coles might have written: “I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach”-—he meant the moral reproach of slavery. “The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a baga­ telle which would not cost me a second thought.”31 But to his son-in-law he wrote just eight weeks later: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital.”32 And when he was mulling over what he would do about Kościuszko’s will, he wrote to a manager:

a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man. in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly. . . . with respect therefore to our women & their children I must pray you

“The Effect on Them Was Electrical" 251

to inculcate upon the overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration with us.33

Jefferson composed one of his most famous metaphors to express his fear of a murderous slave rebellion: “we have the wolf by the ears and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose.”34 But Jeffer­ son also thought of the slave as a creature that inexhaustibly produces gold. His wolf metaphor has been widely published, but an unpublished letter written in 1810 records another remark that is less known: upon learning that a relative thought of selling his slaves, Jefferson said that “it wou’d never do to destroy the goose.”35

Jefferson deployed his most soaring language not where it would do the most good—in a public campaign to awaken the conscience of the slaveholders—but to soothe would-be emancipators while he deflected their petitions. The truth was that slavery would end not when South Carolina planters suddenly started to sing “Amazing Grace” but when it ceased to be profitable, and Jefferson helped to make that day recede into the very, very distant future as vast new territories opened up just over the horizon. When in 1803 Jefferson acquired Louisiana for the United States and doubled the size of the country, the question arose: Would we have slavery in this new land? As the Senate began debate on the purchase, President Jefferson sent a secret note to his floor man­ ager, instructing the senator to insert a clause in the bill for establishing a government in Louisiana: "Slaves shall be admitted into the territory.”36

300 Notes to pages 227-238

14. There was a tradition among some African-American families from Charlottes­ ville that Harriet returned there after TJ’s death and started a family, but the evidence they offered in the 1940s is extremely garbled and calls for further research. Pearl Graham, Notes on an Interview with Three Descendants of Thomas Jefferson, July 28, 1948, typescript graciously provided by Lucia Stanton. Graham, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hernings,” pp. 98-100. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 554-55n47.

15. Quotation from Cleveland American, reprinted in Liberator, Dec. 19, 1845, in Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 165.

16. Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 164. 17. “A Sprig of Jefferson Was Eston Hernings,” Scioto Gazette, Aug. 1, 1902, quoted in

Frontline website “Jefferson’s Blood,” /jefferson/cron/1902sprig.html, also quoted in Leary, "Sally Hemings’s Children," pp. 172-73. According to this account, which appeared nearly fifty years after Eston’s death, “There came from Monticello, Virginia, to Chillicothe, a remark­ ably fine looking colored man and his family. Eston Hernings was of a light bronze color, a little over six feet tall, well proportioned, very erect and dignified; his nearly straight hair showed a tint of auburn.”

www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows

18. Fawn M. Brodie, “Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren,” Getting Word: The Newsletter (Winter 2007/2008), p. 2.

19. “Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp,” Sept. 29, 1917, p. 4; Sept. 30, 1917, p. 3.

20. Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 169. 21. Ibid., p. 162. 22. Ibid., pp. 166-67. 23. Ibid., p. 171.

16. “The Effect on Them Was Electrical” 1. Petition of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, quoted

in Adam Rothman, Slave Country, p. 27. 2. Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” p. 52; Ress, Governor Edward Coles, pp. 11-17. 3. Ress, Governor Edward Coles, p. 34. 4. Monroe, “Edward Coles, Patrician Emancipator,”

1210502.html. www.lib.niu.edu/2005/iht

5. Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” pp. 47-48. 6. Coles, "Emancipation,” Oct. 1827, p. 1. I am very grateful to Bruce Carveth for

generously providing copies of his Coles material. Coles knew he could ease his conscience simply by asking his father for some other property, but he reasoned that the effect would be merely to perpetuate the enslavement of his allotted in­ heritance "as if I had sold the portion of them which I should otherwise have inherited.”

7. He considered and abandoned the idea of keeping the freed people in Virginia, evading the removal law “by not having the free papers recorded,” and formalizing the emancipation in his will so that the freed people would be protected in case of his sudden death.

8. Coles, “Emancipation,” pp. 2—3.

Notes to pages 239-251 301

9. Coles, "Autobiography,” n.p. 10. Ibid. 11. Morse, American Geography, pp. 390—91. 12. Brissot de Warville, quoted in Poole and Buchanan, Anti-Slavery Opinions

Before the Year 1800, .www.gutenberg.org/files/23956/23956-h/23956-h.htm 13. Ress, Governor Edward Coles, pp. 42—43; Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,”

p. 52. 14. Coles to TJ, July 31, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7. 15. TJ to Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7. 16. Coles to TJ, Sept. 26, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7. 17. Billy Wayson, lecture, Jefferson Library, Internationa] Center for Jefferson Stud­

ies, May 2011. 18. Short to TJ, Feb. 27, 1798, in Papers, vol. 30. 19. Kościuszko wrote three more wills in Europe after leaving the United States.

These dealt mainly with his property in Europe, though he did decide in 1806 to leave $3,700 from the U.S. funds to his American godson, Kościuszko Armstrong (son of John Armstrong Jr., U.S. minister to France). He corresponded with TJ in 1817 and reiterated that his intention to free slaves with his American funds re­ mained "fixed.” Kościuszko believed that his European wills would in no way af­ fect his American will, but TJ’s refusal to execute Kosciuszko’s will left it in limbo, an attractive prize for litigants. Armstrong and other claimants tried and failed to invalidate the emancipation will in a U.S. suit in 1823, giving TJ a sec­ ond chance, but he did nothing. Two decades later another suit succeeded, and the U.S. will was declared invalid by the Supreme Court. Had TJ acted as his friend had wished, several enslaved families would have been liberated and be­ come landowners in a free state. Mizwa, “Kosciuszko’s ‘Fortune’ in America and What Became of It,” pp. 1-3.

20. Turner, “Did Jefferson Sleep with Sally Hernings?” 21. Life and Ancestry of Warner Mifflin, pp. 84, 79, 85. 22. Freehling, Reintegration of American History, p. 188. 23. Richard Newman, “Good Communications Corrects Bad Manners,” in Ham­

mond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, p. 77. 24. Fogel, Slavery Debates, p. 39. 25. TJ to Benjamin Banneker, Aug. 30, 1791, in Papers, vol. 22. 26. Foster, Jeffersonian America, pp. 148—49. 27. TJ to Edmund Bacon, memorandum Fall 1806, in Farm Book, p. 25. 28. TJ to Gregoire, Feb. 25, 1809, in Peterson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, p. 1202; TJ

to Joel Barlow, Oct. 8, 1809, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 1. 29. TJ to Burwell, Jan. 28, 1805, in "Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” www

. .monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation 30. Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 347. 31. TJ to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,”

.www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation 32. TJ to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820, in Farm Book, p. 26. 33. TJ to Joel Yancey, Jan. 17, 1819, in Farm Book, p. 43. 34. TJ to Lydia Sigourney, July 18, 1824, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipa­

tion,” .www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation

302 Notes to pages 251-261

35. Elizabeth Trist to Catharine Wistar Bache, Dec. 28, 1810, Family Letters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., .com.

http://retirementseries.dataformat

36. Scanlon and Gallatin, “A Sudden Conceit,” p. 152.

17. “Utopia in Full Reality” 1. Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ellen W. Randolph Coolidge, Aug. 2, 1825, Family

Letters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., . .

http://retirementseries dataformat.com

2. Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 161. 3. Thomas J. Randolph, Speech of Thomas J. Randolph, p. 17. 4. Baldwin, Cross of Redemption, p. 152. 5. Notes on the State of Virginia. 6. TJ to James Monroe, Nov. 24, 1801, in Papers, vol. 35. 7. Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Re­

opening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” pp. 272-73. 8. McColley, Slavery and feffersonian Virginia, p. 125. 9. Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, p. 48.

10. Adam Rothman, Slave Country, pp. 24-26. 11. Ibid., pp. 31-32; Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 345. 12. Brown, “Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 347. 13. Paine to TJ, Jan. 25, 1805; TJ to Paine, June 5, 1805, Jefferson Papers, Library of

Congress. 14. Taylor, From Timbuktu to Katrina, p. 75. 15. Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, p. 47. 16. Appleby, Thomas Jefferson, p. 136. 17. Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, pp. 44—45. 18. Ibid., pp. 30, 39-47. 19. Brown, Constitutional History, p. 215. 20. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, p. 9. 21. William W. Freehling, “The Louisiana Purchase and the Coming of the Civil War,”

in Levinson and Sparrow, Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, pp. 72—73. 22. William Cabell Rives to James Madison, April 18, 1833,

.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-02-02-02-2721. http://rotunda.upress

23. TJ to Joel Yancey, Jan. 17, 1819, in Farm Book, p. 43. 24. TJ to Jeremiah Goodman, Nov. 30, 1815, July 20, 1817, in Farm Book, pp. 40-41. 25. Taylor, “American Abyss,” p. 390. 26. Quoted in Burstein, Jeffersons Secrets, p. 142. 27. Ludwig von Mises, letter to Ayn Rand, Jan. 23, 1958,

.com/2011/04/23/ludwig-von-mises-letter-to-ayn-rand/; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 975.

http://hessenflow.wordpress

28. Interview with Joseph Ellis, /interviews/ellis.html.

www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson

29. TJ to William Short, April 13, 1800, in Papers, vol. 31. 30. Hochman, “Thomas Jefferson,” pp. 223-25. The historian Billy Wayson remarked

to me that TJ was "a genius at finance.” He tapped numerous supplies of credit,

Notes to pages 262-275 303

including the banks he professed to loathe, and skillfully juggled and refinanced his loans.

31. Ibid., p. 238; Sloan, Principle and Interest, p. II. 32. Israel Jefferson quoted in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 481. 33. Stanton, Free Some Day, pp. 144-45. 34. Isaac Granger said; “Sally had a son named Madison, who learned to be a great

fiddler. He has been in Petersburg twice: was here when the balloon went up— the balloon that Beverly sent off.” Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 4.

35. Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, January 8, 1835.

18. Jefferson Anew 1. In the 1790s he purchased the side of the adjacent mountain, Montako, that

could be seen from Monticello, cleared its trees, planted meadows, and set sheep to grazing there to create a pastoral vista.

2. Bon-Harper, “Contrasting Worlds,” pp. 4-5. 3. Peterson, Jefferson Image in the American Mind, p. 49. 4. TJ to Robert Pleasants, Aug. 27, 1796, in Papers, vol. 29. 5. Boulton, “American Paradox,” p. 473. 6. Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals, p. 35. 7. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, pp. 156, 176. 8. Peter S. Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy,” in Boles and Hall,

Seeing Jefferson Anew, p. 14. 9. Kevin Butterfield, Review of Boles, John B.; Hall, Randal L., eds., Seeing Jefferson

Anew: In His Time and Ours. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. April 2011. /reviews/showrev.php?id=31509.

www.h-net.org

10. Walter Johnson, "Inconsistency, Contradiction, and Complete Confusion: The Everyday Life of the Law of Slavery,” Law & Social Inquiry 22, no. 2 (Spring 1997), p. 413.

11. Foster, Jeffersonian America, p. 149. Also quoted in Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness,” in Onuf, Jeffersonian Legacies, p. 163.

12. Onuf, “Scholars’Jefferson,” p. 675. 13. Ellis, American Sphinx, p. 104. 14. David Brooks, "The Great Seduction," New York Times, June 10, 2008. 15. “Jefferson Lottery,” .Monticello.org 16. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, pp. 23, 538, 149, 535, 534. 17. Johnson, “On Agency"; Morris, “Articulation of Two Worlds.” 18. Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, p. 405. 19. Phillips, American Negro Slavery, pp. 184-85. 20. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, p. 232. 21. TJ to David Bailey Warden, Dec. 26, 1820, in Ford, Works of Thomas Jefferson,

vol. 12. 22. TJ to Charles Pinckney, Sept. 30, 1820, in Ford, Works of Thomas Jefferson,

vol. 12; TJ to Thomas Cooper, Sept. 10, 1814, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” pation.

www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emanci

23. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, p. 23.