In addition to the tsunami of students, classes, letters of recommendations, dissertation chapters, and graduate exams, that comes with having the world's greatest job, the recent deafening silence here at Cobbloviate has also been the consequence of the ol’ Bloviator’s unfortunate tendency to say “yes” when he should be saying “not only no, but Hell no!” (This quality was also attributed to President Warren G. Harding, whose father was reputed to have observed that had his son been a daughter, she would have been perpetually in “a family way.”) At any rate, one such ill-advised “yes” led me up yonder to UVA where I proceeded to bore them cross-eyed for a couple of days. On the way back, however, we made what was my first trip to Monticello, the modest little farmstead of the fabled Mr. Jefferson. I’m no expert on T.J., but I know enough to suspect that J.F.K. was pretty close to dead-on in 1962 when he told a White House assemblage of forty-nine Nobel Prize winners that they represented “the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."[
Whatever one thinks about certain aspects of Mr. J’s life, there is no doubt that he was one extraordinarily smart dude. There are more than enough innovations and contrivances at Monticello to keep one’s head spinning for days, and these were the work of one of the most respected humanists in our nation’s history. When it comes to matters mechanical, most great thinkers seem to have been as hopeless as Sarah Palin at a Mensa meeting. Certainly, “voracious” doesn’t come anywhere near describing Jefferson’s appetite for books. The groaning shelves at Monticello don’t even begin to do justice do his uncontrollable book-lust, for their contents represent the second library he assembled after the first was practically given to Congress after the Red Coat pyromaniacs torched its book stash during the War of 1812. If there was anything that Jefferson was as passionate about as books, it was probably wine. No eighteenth century equivalent of “Mad-Dog 20-20” ever passed his lips, I’m pretty sure. He spared no expense to have the best wines he could get from anywhere he could find it in Europe and elsewhere for his special cellar. Come to think of it, there were lots of areas where the ol’ man spared no expense, including the incredible home he built at Monticello over the course of twenty-eight years at a cost (excluding the value of the slave labor involved) estimated to be over $100,000 even way back yonder in dollars. Jefferson had been born into a well-to-do family to start with, and he didn’t exactly marry down when he won the hand of Martha Wayles Skelton, whose substantial inheritance upon her father’s death effectively became his. As the owner at one time or another of 10,000 acres and as many as 267 slaves, he was considered not only one of the richest men in Albermarle County but one of the richest in Virginia as well.
After Mr. Whitney finally decided to invent his gin in 1793, the insatiable looms of the British textile industry fueled an explosive expansion of cotton-growing across the lower South’s plantations. The resulting resurgence in demand for slaves meant that Jefferson’s human holdings began to account for a steadily greater share his assets. By 1822 his 267 slaves might, by a fairly conservative estimate, have been worth $100,000 or so in the right market. Jefferson knew the value of his slave property full well, for on more than one occasion he had been forced to sell some of his slaves in order to reduce his chronic indebtedness. Since slaves were both labor and capital, every new slave baby was a most welcome addition to the Monticello population, and let’s just say the ol’ T.J. probably wasn’t roaming around the slave quarters preaching abstinence. In fact, he confided to his farm manager that he considered “the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” Hence it was not simply on humanitarian grounds that he cautioned overseers against overworking or abusing pregnant slave women, adding piously that “ in this, as in all cases, providence has made our interests and our duties coincide perfectly.”
The first-rate docent who took us through the house actually ‘fessed up that Jefferson had fathered at least one, if not all, of the children born to the “mighty-near-white” slave, Sally Hemings. Hemmings had come into the household as a wedding gift to Mrs. Jefferson from her daddy, the notoriously horny and predatory John Wayles, and most folks think she was actually Mrs. J’s half-sister.(Given that all of the slaves named Hemings that Jefferson acquired subsequently were possibly also his in-laws, the old country song, “I’m my own Grandpa!” might have had special resonance at Monticello.) On the question of slavery itself, however, our guide could only say that Jefferson truly “hated” slavery but just couldn’t manage to get “out from under it.” It was true enough that the Sage of Monticello frequently expressed his angst over slavery as an “infamous practice,” which, he thought, left “the rights of human nature deeply wounded.” The practice of slaveholding, he famously declared, made him “tremble” for my country when I reflect that God is just.” Yet although Jefferson’s public expressions made him one of Virginia’s leading advocates of emancipation, in 1782 when the Virginia legislature passed a law allowing private manumission of slaves, Jefferson made no move to take advantage of the statute. In fact, save for his proposed Ordinance of 1784, which would have banned slavery from the western territories after 1800, he directed most of his energy into efforts to outlaw the further importation of slaves into Virginia, a move that, let’s face it, stood only to enhance the value of the slaves already held by planters like Jefferson himself.
I don’t doubt for a minute the sincerity of the feelings Jefferson expressed or that he found the practice of slavery anything but loathsome. What Jefferson “felt,” however, and what he actually did about his feelings were clearly two different things. This was the guy, after all, who carried on with Sally Hemings despite his declaration that "[t]he amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent." The real reason for the angst-ridden Jefferson’s failure to put his money and his mouth in the same place on the slavery issue was just that, money, or the perpetual lack thereof. Complaining constantly of mounting financial obligations, Jefferson refused to “willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labor.” Since, of course, he was “governed solely” by concerns about the “happiness” of his slaves, Jefferson explained that it would therefore be “worth their while to extraordinary exertions for some time to enable me to put them ultimately on easier footing . . . the moment they have paid the debts due from the estate, two-thirds of which have been contracted by purchasing them.” Not only am I dubious of Jefferson’s claim about how much of his indebtedness could be written up to his purchases of slaves, but I’m certainly not sharp enough to comprehend the logic by which the slaves he had actually bought were obligated to pay for themselves while remaining his property.
Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and surely a fitting check-out date for its ostensible author. His death, along with that of John Adams the same day, was rightly mourned as a great loss for the nation. It was in every sense a much greater loss for his family, particularly for his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, who after serving as her widowed father’s First Lady, essentially ran his household at Monticello for the rest of his post-presidential life while coping with eleven children and an improvident husband of her own. The reward for her devotion? An estate crippled by $107,000 debts run up by her high-living Papa. When the wolves could no longer be kept away from the door, Jefferson’s beloved Monticello and 550 acres of land sold in 1831 for the munificent sum of $7,000.
A number of historians have pointed to George Washington, John Randolph, and other notable Virginians who freed their slaves in their wills. At first glance, this was morally preferable to failing to manumit at all, but even so, the real economic sacrifice here fell on the heirs of large slaveholders who saw a sizable chunk of what the old man could have left them disappear in a puff of posthumous humanitarianism. Of the seven slaves Jefferson freed either during his lifetime (two) or in his will (five), only two were not named Hemings. Tragically, just before his manumission was to take effect, one of the slave carpenters at Monticello saw his wife and children sold at auction to three separate buyers in order to pay down some of ol’ Marse Tom’s massive debt.
My visit to Monticello left me all the more impressed with Jefferson’s intellect and intellectual curiosity. On the other hand, actually seeing the splendidly appointed 11,000-square-foot mansion where he lived and then walking along the grounds and noting the scarcely 100 square foot foundations of the huts occupied by the people who labored from dawn to dusk to support his pampered lifestyle did nothing to elevate my estimate of him as a person. For that matter, neither did the desperate straits in which he left his devoted daughter, Martha. It might well be argued that some portion of her father’s indebtedness could be marked up to his overindulgence of his children and grandchildren during his lifetime. There was also some truth in the contention that some of Jefferson’s economic woes arose from misfortunes that might have befallen anyone. Still, the overriding reality for me is that, for all the time he spent bellyaching about his debts and bemoaning the fact that he had to sell a faithful slave or lacked the cash to purchase that slave’s spouse, here was a man who, so far as I can see, rarely denied himself anything material or aesthetic that he wanted or prized and could possibly be had. We are urged frequently to judge public figures by their public accomplishments rather than their private shortcomings. That’s easier said than done, once you are aware of the latter, of course, and in this case, my admiration for Jefferson’s sacrifices as a “father” to our country simply marks the sacrifices he refused to make for his own family (or the bondsmen whom he liked to characterize in the same terms) as all the more perplexing and regrettable.
