Visiting the Founders' Dilemma

“I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.”  ~ George Washington

“21 Aug. 1805…bought a negro woman Lucretia Jame’s wife, her 2. sons John & Randall and the child of which she is pregnant, when born, for £180.”  ~ Thomas Jefferson’s Memorandum Book  

We traveled the Old Dominion from the northeast corner at Arlington over the state line from DC to the southwest corner at Abingdon, just a tobacco spit away from the Tennessee border.  Along our route we made house calls on some former presidents.  The presidents are long since gone but their homes, from Washington’s Mount Vernon just south of DC to Jefferson’s Monticello on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge, all remain in magnificent restoration.  Four of our nation’s first five presidents hailed from Virginia, George Washington (1) Thomas Jefferson (3) James Madison (4) and James Monroe (5) and we visited the homes of all four. 

 

Reproduced Slave's Cabin at Mount Vernon

Jefferson’s Monticello is easily the most famous, evidenced by the crowds at the hilltop plantation.  It’s a fascinating place; for the architecture, the views, the furnishings and inventions and the beautiful grounds.  You enter the mansion into an entry hall that features an ingenious clock designed by Jefferson that marks the time and the days of the week.  The walls of the entry hall covered with artifacts that Lewis and Clark brought back from their expeditions.  Most are reproductions but it can be jaw dropping when a docent points out the originals.  You enter the library where most of the volumes are reproductions but behind panes of glass you see volumes that the third president held in his hands.  Tour the home and walk the grounds and you realize that Jefferson was the quintessential renaissance man; fluent in five languages and able to read two others, acquainted with nearly every influential person in America, and a great many in Europe as well; a lawyer, agronomist, musician, scientist, philosopher, author, architect, inventor, and statesman.  And yet throughout the tour you can’t step out of that long shadow of controversy that’s darkened Jefferson’s legacy.

The Kitchen at Monticello

I was standing in front of the wine cellar at Monticello when I heard a woman’s disdainful voice, “This was not a happy place.”  I glanced to see an elderly black woman reading the display describing the duties of slaves in the dependencies located under the mansion in the cellar passageway.  You don’t go very far at Monticello without seeing references to slaves and their duties. 

Jefferson's Monticello

During his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 600 human beings; a fact that might not be notable at an 18^th century southern plantation except that this one happened to belong to the man who penned the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  For Jefferson, those truths were only self-evident for white men.  Jefferson decried slavery as a “moral blot” and a “hideous depravity,” while spending a lifetime being a slaver in abolitionists’ clothing; proposing anti-slavery legislation that he certainly realized would never fly.  Jefferson held on to the notion that emancipation should be dependent on the democratic process making the final arbiters free white males.  During his lifetime he freed only two of his slaves; James Hemings and Robert Hemings.  Being the original American shopaholic who never met a gadget, book, or bottle of French wine he didn't like nearly all of his slaves were sold in order to pay off his debts after he had died.  Only five were freed in his will. 

In fact all four of the Virginian presidents whose homes we visited denounced slavery in the strongest terms yet all four owned slaves.  They all advocated a gradual abolition and predicted that over time slavery would experience an obsolescence that would lead to its eventual demise – a convenient arrangement for men with livelihoods and lifestyles that were dependent on the “peculiar institution.” 

In retirement during the debate over the Missouri Compromise, Madison advocated that the importation of slaves into new states would “diffuse” or dilute the number of slaves in slave holding states leading to a sort of natural abolition, “the States holding fewest slaves are those which most readily abolished slavery altogether.”

Madison never predicted a timeline for the diffusion and subsequent disappearance of slavery. It would be some 40 years later that the American Civil War would finally answer a slavery question which despite Madison's prophesy showed little evidence of otherwise going away.  It's a sad irony that these great men who had advocated revolution in order to shed the tyranny of King George counseled patience to blacks suffering the tyranny of slavery.

The argument is made that they were products of their times but that just doesn't jibe with the fact that in so many ways they were men who were forward thinking beyond their times.  Jefferson’s humanism shrivels in his very words; "I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm," he remarked in 1820.  "What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption."   The man who advanced the concept of all men being created equal never could bring himself to go all in when it came to black men and women.  This renaissance man of extraordinary intellect and breadth of knowledge sadly and surprisingly held blacks to be “as incapable as children” and claimed, "in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”  Jefferson fathered six children by Sally Hemings, one of his domestic slaves.  She was never freed, and in a sort of tragic robbery of her humanity there were no images ever made of her and only four descriptions of her have ever been found.  Regrettably she wasn't found worthy enough to be buried in the Jefferson family grave site. 

America has a historical dilemma in reconciling the greatness of these four presidents (Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence; Washington had the unenviable task of being the first president; Madison birthed the Bill of Rights; Monroe gave the country its identity) with their history as slaveholders.  These were great men; men of talent and intelligence with extraordinary breadth of knowledge with beliefs that were ironically and tragically limited in the true meaning of the equality of all men.

There’s an odd sort of coming together at Monticello, that carries a certain degree of awkwardness.  White tourists and black tourists take the house tour, walk the grounds, take pictures, buy souvenirs and do all that tourist stuff.  And while they’re touring the same home and grounds, looking at the same Jeffersonian inventions and gadgets and reading the same historical descriptions, they’re seeing something completely different.  How could it be otherwise?  While I marveled at the genius of the architect who designed that magnificent home, the black woman next to me in the wine cellar saw a place that dehumanized her ancestors.  Sure, standing in that cellar I could be aware of her feelings but I could in no way fathom them.

Just before we left Monticello we watched a small debate between a black woman and a white woman.  The docents at Monticello universally use the term, “enslaved people.”  The term is also used on the Monticello website.  The black woman objected, saying that she would have preferred the term, “people from Africa.”  It was, she seemed to be saying, as if those slaves had no past before they were made slaves.  The white woman countered that “enslaved people” describes the situation that they found themselves in.  “It’s history,” she said.  “It’s the way things were and you can’t avoid it and you can't change it” They sat on benches, facing each other, exchanging opinions with not a hint of acrimony.  Two women who’d never met before, who probably hailed from different states, undoubtedly had different life experiences found themselves at the home of the third president of their nation having a civil discussion on one of the most polarizing topics in American history – race.