"Those Who Labor for My Happiness"

Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

Lucia C. Stanton

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813932224
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire des débuts de l'Amérique

Our perception of life at Monticello has changed dramatically over the past quarter century. The image of an estate presided over by a benevolent Thomas Jefferson has given way to a more complex view of Monticello as a working plantation, the success of which was made possible by the work of slaves. At the center of this transition has been the work of Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, recognized as the leading interpreter of Jefferson's life as a planter and master and of the lives of his slaves and their descendants. This volume represents the first attempt to pull together Stanton's most important writings on slavery at Monticello and beyond.

Stanton's pioneering work deepened our understanding of Jefferson without demonizing him. But perhaps even more important is the light her writings have shed on the lives of the slaves at Monticello. Her detailed reconstruction for modern readers of slaves' lives vividly reveals their active roles in the creation of Monticello and a dynamic community previously unimagined. The essays collected here address a rich variety of topics, from family histories (including the Hemingses) to the temporary slave community at Jefferson's White House to stories of former slaves' lives after Monticello. Each piece is characterized by Stanton's deep knowledge of her subject and by her determination to do justice to both Jefferson and his slaves.

Published in association with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Notes

Short Titles and Abbreviations

AAMLO	African American Museum and Library, Oakland
Bear	James A. Bear, Jr., ed, Jefferson at Monticello (Charlottesville, 1967)
Betts, Farm Book	Edwin M. Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book (Princeton, 1953)
Betts and Bear	Edwin M. Betts and James A. Bear, Jr., eds., The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, 1986)
CSmH	Huntington Library, San Marino
DHU	Howard University Archives, Washington
DLC	Library of Congress
FB	Facsimile of Jefferson’s Farm Book, in Betts, Farm Book
FLDA	Family Letters Digital Archive, www.monticello.org/familyletters
Ford	Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson [Federal Edition], 12 vols. (New York, 1904–1905)
GB	Edwin M. Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book (Philadelphia, 1944)
GWA	Getting Word Archive, Jefferson Library, Monticello
L&B	Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, 1903–1904)
LofA	Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson [Library of America] (New York, 1984)
MB	James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826 (Princeton, 1997)
MHi	Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
NARA	National Archives and Record Administration
NcU	University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
PTJ	Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 37 vols. (Princeton, 1950–)
PTJ-R	J. Jefferson Looney, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, 7 vols. (Princeton, 2004-)
TJ	Thomas Jefferson
ViU	University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville

Introduction

1. MB.

2. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956).

3. Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville, 1993).

4. This famous phrase was coined by novelist L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between (London, 1953).

“Those Who Labor for My Happiness”

The title of this essay in drawn from TJ’s letter to Angelica Church, 27 Nov. 1793: “I have my house to build, my feilds to form, and to watch for the happiness of those who labor for mine” (PTJ, 27:449).

I would like to thank the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation for their support of work on a related project. I could not have written this essay without those months spent considering the lives of Jefferson’s slaves. I am also grateful to Peter Onuf, for suggestions about structure that were vital to the final product.

In my work on this subject I am following trails already blazed by others, notably James A. Bear, Jr., whose longtime interest in the Hemings family of Monticello has nourished my curiosity and informed far more of his work than the directly relevant “The Hemings Family of Monticello,” Virginia Cavalcade 29, no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 78–87. Other useful accounts of the African American residents of Monticello include “To Possess Living Souls,” chapter 4 in Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York, 1988), 94–145; and Elizabeth Langhorne, “The Other Hemings,” Albemarle Magazine, Oct.–Nov. 1980, 59–66, and “A Black Family at Monticello,” Magazine of Albemarle County History 43 (1985): 1–16. Note that in her discussion of the fate of Sally Hemings after Jefferson’s death, in the latter article and in chapter 37 of Monticello: A Family Story (Chapel Hill, 1987), Langhorne mistakes her for Sally Cottrell, who was held by the Randolphs. Material on Jefferson and Monticello contributes to an excellent discussion of larger issues in Mary Beth Norton, Herbert G. Gutman, and Ira Berlin, “The Afro-American Family in the Age of Revolution,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Urbana, 1986), 175–191. Beware, however, of table 3, on page 184, which credits Jefferson with twice as many slaves as he actually had.

1. Charlottesville Central Gazette, 13 Jan. 1827. Only fragmentary documentation survives for the Jan. 1827 sale. Transactions are mentioned in occasional letters and in almost 30 sales slips, which note the purchase of only thirty-four slaves (Monticello Dispersal Sale receipts, ViU: 5291). Apparently all 130 slaves were not actually sold in 1827, as an account of a second sale of 33 slaves, 1 Jan. 1829, also survives (ViU: 8937).

2. Mary J. Randolph to Ellen Coolidge, 25 Jan. 1827, FLDA; Thomas Jefferson Randolph reminiscences, ViU: 1397. Randolph actually attended the sale; his sister Mary did not.

3. FB, 27.

4. TJ to Henry Rose, 23 Oct. 1801, PTJ, 35:495; TJ to Craven Peyton, 14 Nov. 1819, Betts, Farm Book, 145; TJ to James Madison, 26 July 1806, DLC; TJ to M. B. Jefferson, 2 Aug. 1815, Betts, Farm Book, 39.

5. Because of his surname, it has been suggested that Joseph Fossett may have been the son of William Fossett, a white carpenter working at Monticello from 1775 to 1779 (MB 391, 483, 486). Some of Joseph Fossett’s descendants make the claim that Jefferson was his father (See Lerone Bennett, “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren,” Ebony 10 [Nov. 1954]: 78–80). Betty Hemings may actually have had 11 children at this time. Lee Marmon, researcher for Poplar Forest, makes the plausible suggestion that Doll (b. 1757), wife of Abraham, a carpenter, was her daughter (“Poplar Forest Research Report,” pt. 3, Aug. 1991, 39).

6. Jefferson inaugurated his Farm Book with three lists of slaves at the time of the division of the Wayles estate: the first, a roll of his own 52 slaves in Albemarle County; the second, the 135 Wayles slaves and their locations; the third, a list of the combined total of 187, with new locations in three counties (FB, 5–18). In 1782 his Albemarle County total was 129, behind Edward Carter with 242 slaves and ahead of the estate of Robert Carter Nicholas, with 120 slaves (Lester J. Cappon, “Personal Property Tax List of Albemarle County, 1782,” Magazine of Albemarle County History 5 [1944–1945); 54, 69, 72). After the sale of his Goochland and Cumberland County lands in the 1790s, Jefferson’s slave property was usually distributed in a ratio of three to two between his Albemarle and Bedford County estates—both about 5,000 acres. The combined totals for 1796, 1810, and 1815 were 167, 199, and 223 (“Jefferson’s Slaves: Approximate Total Numbers,” 8 Mar. 1990, Monticello Research Department). By the end of 1794, Jefferson had sold ninety slaves; he gave seventy-six to his sister and daughters on their marriages (“Negroes alienated from 1784 to 1794,” Feinstone Collection, David Library of the American Revolution, on deposit at American Philosophical Society; this document is no doubt the missing page 25 of Jefferson’s Farm Book).

7. TJ to John Wayles Eppes, 30 June 1820, ViU. On this particular occasion, he was grateful for Eppes’s offer to buy slaves without moving them from Poplar Forest. This kept them “in the family.” Isaac Jefferson’s mother Ursula Granger was bought at the request of Martha Jefferson, because she was “a favorite house woman”; Jefferson purchased Nance Hemings the weaver on the resumption of textile production in 1795; and young men were needed for the digging of his canal in the 1790s (TJ to Archibald Thweatt, 29 May 1810, DLC; TJ to W. Callis, 8 May 1795, ViU; MB 957, 1153; TJ to John Jordan, 21 Dec. 1805, Betts, Farm Book, 21).

8. Jordan to TJ, 4 Dec. 1805, MHi; TJ to Jordan, 21 Dec. 1805 and 9 Feb. 1806, Betts, Farm Book, 21–22.

9. TJ to Randolph Lewis, 23 Apr. 1807, Betts, Farm Book, 26; TJ to Jeremiah Goodman, 6 Jan. 1815, GB, 540. This letter also suggests that Jefferson instructed his overseers to make some efforts to control behavior. Goodman, who interpreted the “home” rule too strictly, repeatedly “drove” Phill Hubbard from his wife Hanah’s house and punished her for receiving him. Hubbar...