French hovels, slave cabins, and the limits of Jefferson’s eyes Oxford Bibliographies
Oxford Bibliographies is a sophisticated online recommendation service that provides original scholarly content used and trusted by professional researchers worldwide.
By Maurizio Valsania April 13th 2017
Thomas Jefferson was a deliberate man and nothing escaped his attention.
Jefferson‘s eyes were powerful, lively, and penetrating. Testimonies swore that his eyes were nothing short of “the eye of an eagle.” He wore spectacles occasionally, especially for reading, but his eyes stood the test of time despite physiological
decline. “My own health is quite broken down,” he wrote on 3 March 1826 to Robert Mills, the architect who designed the obelisk for the Bunker Hill monument. Mostly confined in the house, Jefferson proclaimed, “my faculties, sight excepted are very much impaired.”
Jefferson’s powerful eyes constantly dissected and analyzed: especially for scientific reasons, Jefferson spied on people’s lives. He always wanted to see, and to see firsthand. During his famous tour of southern France and northern Italy in the spring of 1787, he saw examples of misery and wretchedness—especially where lower classes were concerned. He had entered the shacks of French peasants incognito. To peep into people’s dwellings was for Jefferson the best method to assess their
hovels as I have done,” Jefferson wrote to his friend Lafayette, “look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft.”
Most likely, this Jeffersonian method of spying did more than just provide reliable sociological data: it enhanced his empathy. Reading this letter to Lafayette, the reader gets the impression that Jefferson drew himself closer to these hapless human beings, pitying them and caring for their conditions, seeing them for who they actually were. But in other ways, Jefferson’s eyes were blind: did he ever actually see his slaves’ cabins? Did he ever ferret slaves out of their shackles to observe and meditate about their condition?
Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. with excerpts from the Declaration of
Independence in background by Rudulph Evans, photo by Prisonblues. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Most of Jefferson’s slaves were confined in cramped living quarters, leading lives undoubtedly worse than those led by French peasants. But there is no clear trace of empathy on the part of Jefferson for his slaves. His correspondence, his
memorandum books, and especially his farm book show us how Jefferson
consistently saw his slaves—at least the huge majority of them. Black bodies are usually crouched to perform vile doings; they are dirty, their faces often bear a hideous grin, and their countenance is disfigured by hard labor. By and large,
Jefferson covered black bodies in “negro cloth,” rough osnaburgs, coarse duffels, or bristly mixtures of hemp and cotton.
In respect to African-American slaves, Jefferson’s eyes were myopic at best. Perhaps this was a personal fault, or perhaps this eighteenth-century man was simply
hindered by the peculiar institution in which he was reared. But some slaves at Monticello led deliberate lives and exerted a lot of effort to appear different. In the slave cabins on Mulberry Row, especially those occupied by the large Hemings family, we catch a glimpse of what kind of differentiated selves Jefferson’s luckier “servants” were trying to preserve.
Jefferson’s last great-grandchild, Martha Jefferson Trist Burke, was impressed by just that kind of self-making when she visited John and Priscilla Hemings‘s cabin. Little Martha was less than three years old when she saw what her great-grandfather’s eyes had probably never noticed—that African-American slaves obviously liked cleanness, tidiness, and little comforts. Amid the oppression and relative material deprivation of their situation, many slaves succeeded in performances of dignity. Whenever possible, they stepped outside of spaces in which they were forced to perform utilitarian functions, such as kitchens, laundries, and privies, and moved on a private stage of their own choice, with character, decorum, and full-fledged
humanity. “I remember the appearance of the interior of that cabin,” Martha wrote in her journal, “the position of the bed with it’s [sic] white counterpane and ruffled pillow cases and of the little table with it’s [sic] clean white cloth, and a shelf over it, on which stood an old fashioned band box with wall paper covering, representing dogs running, this box excited my admiration and probably fixed the whole scene in my mind.”
Did Jefferson ever see such intimate details of the lives of his slaves? Realizing the immense symbolic and existential power represented by the decorative objects and
cleanliness Martha saw would have emotionally devastated him. Peeping into the coziness and dignity of the Hemings’ cabin might have provided Jefferson with extra reason to amend his racial hierarchies. Some black bodies, within Jefferson’s own plantation, created their own backgrounds of white clean cloth and improvised petit bourgeois coziness, delicacy, and “femininity.” It’s doubtful that Jefferson ever
enlarged his observations of these ill-fated persons, discovering the wider dimensions of African-American corporeal and spiritual identity.
Again, we have no conclusive evidence of Thomas Jefferson using his keen eyes to empathize with the oppressed people who immediately surrounded him. A big chapter on the “negro” fashion, their style and taste, seems to be missing from Jefferson’s records. We will never know if Jefferson’s eyes ever grasped the liberating, creative power couched in simple pillows, white counterpanes, clean white tablecloths, and boxes covered with paper on which decorative dogs ran.
Third president of the United States (1801–1809), coauthor of the Declaration of Independence, governor of Virginia during troublesome times (1779–1781), president of the American Philosophical Society (1797–1815), the mind behind the Louisiana Purchase (1803), and the sanguine “founding father” of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was undoubtedly an achiever. His stature as a public figure and an internationally renowned politician has produced an enthusiasm that, after almost two centuries since his death (on 4 July 1826), does not seem to waver. Both academics and the wider audience, regardless of their political orientation, are still eager to identify with this leader, or at least to extol his greatness and exemplarity. “If Jefferson was wrong,” has prophesized James Parton, a famous 19th-century
biographer, “America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.” Jefferson’s prominence as a leader matches his achievements in the intellectual realm. Greatness
must be bestowed on Jefferson also when we take him as a philosopher. A polymath spanning over a number of scientific disciplines as well as literature, art, classical languages, geographical explorations, architecture, and, of course, political science, Jefferson helped define the vocabulary of his days. Albeit not a systematic thinker, he delved extensively into numberless concepts, including human nature, virtue,
happiness, nation, and government. While achievements and exemplarity are thus well attested, the scholarship underwent a dramatic turn in the early 1980s, when Jefferson the private man entered the scene. Scholars have begun questioning the characteristics of Jefferson as a model and a symbol hovering above historical time. They have stopped asking exclusively what Jefferson could mean to us, to
civilization, and to future generations. More and more, this 18th-century man has emerged as trapped in a distant culture, ensnared in a far-off society far more complex than previous generations of scholars used to believe, and with which we cannot identify. Issues of inner life, anxiety, emotion, a romantic heart, gender, race, the dynamics of slavery, and many other aspects related to his mind have justly captured the attention. Increased specialization has splintered Jefferson the symbol into a myriad of fragments. Whether or not Jefferson was actually a sphinx, or a living contradiction, research has repeatedly shown that this real man—a Virginian slave owner, a hapless tobacco grower, a restless letter writer, an obsessive journal keeper, an aristocrat mansion dweller, and a romantic Enlightenment devotee— belonged to himself.
Primary Sources
Even though collections of Jefferson writings began to circulate right after his death, it was only with the publication of Papers of Thomas Jefferson that scholarship arrived at mature editorial criteria. This major project covers Jefferson’s
correspondence and other types of documents (see especially the Second Series), but it is still ongoing. Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Boyd, et al. 1950–) has been
which focuses on the retirement-era correspondence (1809–1826). Both projects are expected to be drawn to completion sometime between 2025 and 2030. Most volumes of these series are also available in Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Digital Edition (Oberg and Looney 2009), a fully searchable text. Works of Thomas Jefferson (Ford 1904–1905) is the second-best choice. Accurately transcribed from manuscripts, freely accessible online, and still valuable, this edition is not as comprehensive as Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Lipscomb and Bergh 1903–1905). This last edition, basically a compendium of reprints, is the most comprehensive, to date, but it is highly unreliable, does not indicate sources for specific items, and recklessly
modernizes spelling and punctuation. Thomas Jefferson: Writings (Peterson 1984) is the best single-volume selection of documents, a recommended starting point for every research project. The letters Jefferson and John Adams sent each other over the several decades of their friendship stick out as a first-rate philosophical treatise on several subjects. They are fortunately available in Adams-Jefferson Letters (Cappon 1959). Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia has been adequately commented and annotated in Peden 1995 (originally published in 1954).
Boyd, Julian P., Lyman H. Butterfield, and Mina R. Brian, eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. 38 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–. E-mail Citation »
The most reliable and updated collection of letters by and to Jefferson, private notes, and other documents. Historical notes by the editors (in many cases actual scholarly essays) provide the context for the printed material. Upon completion, this edition will supplant the older editions.
Cappon, Lester J., ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete
Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
E-mail Citation »
The complete correspondence between Adams and Jefferson. Arranged in chronological sequence, this collection introduces readers into the vigor and broadness of these two minds. Fully annotated and well edited. Reprinted as recently as 1990.
Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. The Works of Thomas Jefferson: Federal Edition. 12 vols. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s, 1904–1905.
E-mail Citation »
Reasonably well-edited albeit incomplete edition of Jefferson’s writings. Republished as recently as 2009 (New York: Cosimo). Text available online. Lipscomb, Andrew A., and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds. The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson. 20 vols. Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–1905.
E-mail Citation »
Still the only printed source for many of Jefferson’s documents, this edition suffers from a general lack of editorial accuracy. It contains little or no annotation. Text available online.
Looney, J. Jefferson, ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. 8 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004–.
E-mail Citation »
Focuses on Jefferson’s correspondence after the third president returned to private life in March 1809. Editorially accurate, this series covers some material that has never been published before.
Oberg, Barbara B., and J. Jefferson Looney, eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Digital Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. E-mail Citation »
Fully searchable edition of most volumes both from the main series of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Boyd, et al. 1950–) and the Retirement Series (Looney 2004–).
Peden, William, ed. Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
E-mail Citation »
Fully annotated edition of Jefferson’s masterpiece. The introduction gives important information on the vicissitudes and complicated history of this book. Originally published in 1954.
Peterson, Merrill D., ed. Thomas Jefferson: Writings. Library of America 17. New York: Viking, 1984.
E-mail Citation »
Single-volume selection of Jefferson’s writings, including the so-called
Autobiography, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, the Notes on the State of Virginia, the Declaration of Independence, addresses and messages, public papers, and letters. Well edited.
