Productivity immediately soared. Maintaining a high level of activity required a commensurate level of discipline. Thus, in the fall of , when Lilly was informed that one of the nail boys was sick, he would have none of it. Oldham reported that James Hemings, the 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. 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.
This put Jefferson in a quandary. On a recent afternoon at Monticello, Fraser Neiman, the head archaeologist, led the way down the mountain into a ravine, following the trace of a road laid out by Jefferson for his carriage rides. It passed the house of Edmund Bacon, the overseer Jefferson employed from to , about a mile from the mansion. The archaeologists discovered unmistakable evidence of the shop—nails, nail rod, charcoal, coal and slag. At first James performed abysmally, wasting more material than any of the other nail boys.
Perhaps he was just a slow learner; perhaps he hated it; but he made himself better and better at the miserable work, swinging his hammer thousands of times a day, until he excelled. A model slave, eager to improve himself, Hubbard grasped every opportunity the system offered. In his time off from the nailery, he took on additional tasks to earn cash. He sacrificed sleep to make money by burning charcoal, tending a kiln through the night.
Jefferson also paid him for hauling—a position of trust because a man with a horse and permission to leave the plantation could easily escape.
Through his industriousness Hubbard laid aside enough cash to purchase some fine clothes, including a hat, knee breeches and two overcoats. For years he had patiently carried out an elaborate deception, pretending to be the loyal, hardworking slave.
He had done that hard work not to soften a life in slavery but to escape it. The clothing was not for show; it was a disguise.
Hubbard had been gone for many weeks when the president received a letter from the sheriff of Fairfax County. He had in custody a man named Hubbard who had confessed to being an escaped slave. In his confession Hubbard revealed the details of his escape. When Hubbard reached Fairfax County, about miles north of Monticello, the sheriff stopped him, demanding to see his papers. Hubbard was returned to Monticello. If he received some punishment for his escape, there is no record of it. The October schedule of work for the nailery shows Hubbard working with the heaviest gauge of rod with a daily output of 15 pounds of nails.
Jefferson may have trusted him again, but Bacon remained wary. He has hid them somewhere, and if we say no more about it, we shall find them. Walking through the woods after a heavy rain, Bacon spotted muddy tracks on the leaves on one side of the path.
He followed the tracks to their end, where he found the nails buried in a large box. Immediately, he went up the mountain to inform Jefferson of the discovery and of his certainty that Hubbard was the thief. When Jefferson showed up the next day, Bacon had Hubbard called in.
At the sight of his master, Hubbard burst into tears. He was mortified and distressed beyond measure Now his character was gone. He has suffered enough already. On his authorized absences from the plantation to attend church, Hubbard made arrangements for another escape. During the holiday season in late , Hubbard vanished again.
The boatman might have been part of a network that plied the Rivanna and James rivers, smuggling goods and fugitives. At some point Hubbard headed southwest, not north, across the Blue Ridge. He made his way to the town of Lexington, where he was able to live for over a year as a free man, being in possession of an impeccable manumission document.
A year after his escape Hubbard was spotted in Lexington. Before he could be captured, he took off again, heading farther west into the Allegheny Mountains, but Jefferson put a slave tracker on his trail. The man who provided Hubbard with the papers spent six months in jail. Jefferson sold Hubbard to one of his overseers, and his final fate is not known.
Slaves lived as if in an occupied country. As Hubbard discovered, few could outrun the newspaper ads, slave patrols, vigilant sheriffs demanding papers and slave-catching bounty hunters with their guns and dogs. Hubbard was brave or desperate enough to try it twice, unmoved by the incentives Jefferson held out to cooperative, diligent, industrious slaves.
The Polish nobleman, who had arrived from Europe in to aid the Americans, left a substantial fortune to Jefferson. In the spring of , Jefferson pondered what to do with the legacy.
Kosciuszko 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. Later, Jefferson argued for gradual emancipation and an end to slavery in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia. However, within the same document, he also perpetuated racial prejudices about the inferiority of the enslaved based on their skin color.
As a result, he adopted a more passive attitude toward slavery in his later years, probably to bolster his political career. He was a meticulous record keeper, tracking everything from the daily weather to his wine purchases and dinner guests. In addition to his record keeping, he also wrote thousands of letters during his lifetime, and used a letter copying device called a polygraph to copy letters for his personal records.
Initially, his household staff only consisted of around five people and eventually expanded to approximately twelve. For example, we have no evidence that Sally Hemings ever visited the White House, but she certainly never worked at the White House, despite her personal relationship with Jefferson. It was particularly important that Sally Hemings not be seen at the White House. Jefferson was keen to avoid further discussion on this subject, and therefore as far as we know, Sally Hemings and other members of the Hemings family stayed at Monticello during his entire presidency.
Both were exposed to a free black community. Although Sally and James both returned to the United States with Jefferson, their newfound exposure to freedom allowed each to negotiate with Jefferson to improve their circumstances. Eventually, Jefferson agreed to free James on the condition that he would train another enslaved individual at Monticello in the style of French cooking. After James trained his brother, Peter, Jefferson signed manumission papers.
He did not want to lose more people by exposing them to new ideas and communities. Jefferson also probably understood the irony of bringing enslaved labor to the Executive Mansion, a symbol of liberty and freedom in the early United States. At Monticello, Jefferson made a deliberate effort to minimize the visibility of enslaved labor.
He constructed service wings beneath walkways and built cabins for his enslaved workers into the side of a hill, hiding them from immediate view from the main house. In addition, Jefferson used a system of food trays and dumbwaiters to eliminate the need for enslaved labor directly in his entertaining spaces. Instead, enslaved workers sent food and wine to the dining room using a pulley system and a rotating door.
In the White House, maintaining the same systems of separation would have been more difficult to achieve. President John Adams , the first occupant of the residence, was not a slave owner and adopted a staunchly antislavery agenda. He also employed a rotating roster of maids and washerwomen which included Sally Houseman and Biddy Boyle. Despite his preference for white household staff, Jefferson did make several exceptions to this rule.
The first to arrive was fourteen-year-old Ursula Granger Hughes. The baby was the first to be born in the White House. Unfortunately, the child was in fragile health and Ursula returned to Monticello later that summer. The child did not survive. Both women gave birth to children in the White House. Edith gave birth to three children during this period and two survived to adulthood: James and Maria Fossett, born in and respectively.
A third child born in did not survive. In , Frances also gave birth to a child at the White House. Sadly, the baby died of whooping cough the same year. While Ursula, Edith, and Frances were the only enslaved individuals to come directly from Monticello, Jefferson also employed another enslaved man named John Freeman.
He acquired approximately enslaved people through inheritance: about 40 from the estate of his father, Peter Jefferson , in , and from his father-in-law, John Wayles , in Jefferson purchased fewer than twenty slaves in his lifetime. Jefferson knew slavery was the primary economic engine for the South.
Jefferson directly profited from the labor of enslaved people on his four quarter farms and at his retreat home, Poplar Forest. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop that required a considerable enslaved labor force, and Jefferson was generally concerned about his profit. Additionally, the people themselves were profitable. In Virginia, unlike the Caribbean, enslaved women achieved fertility rates that allowed for a self-reproducing enslaved population. Planters could satisfy the demand for slave labor without having to import slaves from Africa.
Jefferson did buy and sell human beings. He purchased slaves occasionally, because of labor needs or to unite spouses. Despite his expressed "scruples" against selling slaves except "for delinquency, or on their own request," he sold more than in his lifetime, mainly for financial reasons.
Seventy-one people were sold from his Goochland and Bedford county plantations in three sales in the s and s. Chronic runaways and resisters like Sandy, James Hubbard , and Billy were almost invariably sold. His record of slaves "alienated" from his ownership—whether by sale or gift—in the ten-year period from to listed men, women, and children.
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