The Many Faces of Slavery by Lawrence Aje Catherine Armstrong

Author:Lawrence Aje, Catherine Armstrong [Lawrence Aje, Catherine Armstrong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350298682
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2021-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Slave leasing and patriarchy

In 1814, Jefferson outlined his plan to ameliorate his own slaves as a precursor to future emancipation. Until all slaveowners in Virginia consented to abolish slavery, planters ‘should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed & clothe them well, protect them from ill usage, require such reasonable labour only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, and be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them’.41 Ironically, Jefferson’s amelioration project at Monticello was facilitated by the hiring of outside slaves. While Jefferson worked to transform his own enslaved workers from unskilled field hands to artisans, managers and house servants on his mountaintop, he began hiring slaves to fill the labour vacuum created on his outlying farms. Most of the enslaved men hired at Monticello between the 1790s and Jefferson’s retirement from the presidency in 1809 were ‘employed in a little farming but mainly in other works about my mills, & grounds generally’.42

Jefferson’s lease of four enslaved men, Essex, Isaac, Patrick and Peter, illustrates the unique roles that hired slaves played at Monticello. In 1794, Jefferson authorized the hire of ‘four very able intelligent negro men’. At the end of January, ‘4 negro men arrive[d]’ at Monticello, to comprise ‘a good force for my works’ at the canal for the toll mill on the Rivanna river.43 Still, the blasting of rocks for the canal was not the only project that Essex, Isaac, Peter and Patrick worked on when they were hired at Monticello. In the summer of 1795, these men, all rented from the estate of Thomas Mann Randolph, Sr, were a major part of the ‘force employed’ during the wheat harvest.44

This workforce, which Jefferson imagined as a ‘machine’ moving in ‘exact equilibrio’, was comprised of fifty-eight men and women in July – eighteen cradlers, eighteen binders, six gatherers, three loaders, six stackers, two cooks and four carters. In addition, George Granger, Sr, outfitted with ‘tools & a grindstone’, drove a single mule cart ‘from tree to tree as the work advanced’ and was ‘constantly employed in mending cradles & grinding scythes’ as well as doling out liquor to the labourers. Patrick, Peter and Isaac worked as ‘cradlers’ during the hot July harvest; cradling wheat was the most onerous task, and consisted of men using a scythe attached to wooden ‘fingers’ to cut the wheat and lay it neatly in a row for collection by the ‘gatherers’ and ‘stackers’. Essex, who was likely weaker than the other three hired men, was tasked with stacking the wheat cut by the cradlers. Jefferson noted that in three days in July, twelve cradlers harvested seventy-three acres of wheat at the Shadwell quarter farm; he calculated that each cradler could cut three acres of the crop, working sunup to sundown.45 It seems clear that those slaves hired in the 1790s and 1810s often performed the most physically demanding work on the plantation, while many of Jefferson’s own slaves became more skilled domestic labourers in

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