A Date That Will Live In Infamy
August 20 will soon come and quickly pass, its significance almost universally unrecognized.
For some, however, like December 7, 1941, it will remain “a date which will live in infamy.”
On May 14, 1607, roughly one-hundred members of the Virginia Company, searching for gold and a route to the Pacific Ocean that would allow them to establish trade with the Orient, arrived on the banks of the James River.
In late Spring 1619, the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista departed Luanda, Angola with approximately 350 members of the native Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms who had been kidnapped by Portuguese slave traders; an estimated 143 slave died during the trans-Atlantic crossing to Jamaica, where 24 boys were traded for supplies. In July, in the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf of Mexico, English privateers – pirate - aboard the White Lion and the Treasurer attacked the San Juan, snatching up to 60 of the Bautista’s slaves. When the White Lion docked at Point Comfort on August 20, the prisoners were traded for food.
The August 1619 arrival at Point Comfort (today’s Fort Monroe) of “20 and odd” captured Africans would mark the beginning of chattel slavery in the future United States.
In 1662, a Virginia court ruled that children born to enslaved mothers were the property of the mother’s owner and, as cotton and sugar became the mainstays of colonial economies, slavery became the engine.
By the time of the Americana Revolution, English slave traders had brought some three million Africans to the colonies. It is estimated that more than one million died from hunger, disease and mistreatment during Atlantic crossings and it is impossible, even now, to establish the number of people who died in wars and forced marches directly resulting from the Western Hemisphere’s demand for slaves.
In the late 1700s, enslaved labor had lost its importance in Northern states and most had passed legislation to abolish slavery. In the South, however, the 1793 invention of the cotton gin had a double effect: Cotton and tobacco became the major industries of Southern states and increased the need for slave labor. Although Britian banned the African slave trade in 1807, the trade of African captives to Brazil and Cuba continued until the 1860s.
While in Paris as a Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Versailles for the Confederation Congress (1784-1789), Thomas Jefferson wrote Brissot de Warville, a French revolutionary, journalist and founder of the anti-slavery Society of the Friends of the Blacks, “[Y]ou know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.”
Such a wish, however, was contrary to Jefferson’s financial wellbeing.
He inherited the properties that would become his famed Monticello plantation and his first slaves – variously estimated at around thirty to sixty - from his father’s estate (1757) and 135 from his father-in-law (1773) and purchased about 20 enslaved people outright; the remainder of the 607 he owned in his lifetime were born into captivity.
Jefferson referred to himself as someone who would “watch for the happiness of those who labor for mine,” while he profited from their labors in his tobacco, corn and wheat fields. But he also profited through the birth of these slaves’ children.
In the early 1800s, as the “cotton belt” of the new nation expanded through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, the need for labor – slaves - increased. As the self-reproduction of Virginia’s slave population increased from almost 288,000 in 1790 to 454,000 in 1830, Virginia became – in the words of former slave Louis Hughes - the “mother of slavery” and the primary supplier of enslaved labor to other states through the domestic slave trade.
At the same time, Jefferson’s attitudes about slavery twisted and turned in a conflict between values and actual practices
“This abomination must have an end,” Jefferson wrote to Edward Ruthledge in July 1787. The Virginian who would become the Third President the United States also predicted that slavery would result in a race war “which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.”
By the 1790s, he was attempting to bring the Enlightenment to his properties by instituting “a rational and humane plan” – eliminating slave-owner violence and recognizing slaves as human – but inferior to whites on the “scale of beings” – rather than “subjects of property as… horses or cattle.”
To achieve this goal, Jefferson struggled to abandon the “slovenly business of tobacco making” and institute wheat farming and small-scale industries like nail and textile production. Some female slaves were employed as domestic servants at Monticello; men were trained as charcoal-burners, blacksmiths, and carpenters; some received financial incentives or percentages of the workshop profits. “My first wish is that the labourers may be well treated,” Jefferson wrote. He also introduced single-family housing, eliminating the multifamily dwellings that were characteristic of Southern slavery.
Despite his Enlightenment-inspired changes, the Monticello Foundation reveals another dynamic of Jefferson’s utilitarian response to slavery:
“Jefferson also encouraged - and wielded control over - enslaved families, particularly the bodies of enslaved women. ‘I consider a woman who brings a child every two years’ as ‘an addition to the capital,’ Jefferson wrote. Like many planters in the nineteenth century, Jefferson sought to capitalize on the rising value of enslaved human bodies, who were increasingly being mortgaged, sold, leased, and insured for the financial benefit of their owners.”
In July 1787, while serving as an ambassador in Paris, Jefferson wrote Edward Ruthledge of South Carolina and the youngest signatory of the Declaration of Independence:
“I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it for ever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.”
Jefferson’s career of service was unique in the history of the nation of which he played a founding role:
1776 - 1779 – Virginia State Delegate to the Continental Congress
1779 – 1781 - Governor of Virginia
1781 – Virginia State Delegate
1785 – 1789 – United States Ambassador to France
1790 – 1793 – United States Secretary of State
1797 – 1801 - Vice President of the United States
1801 – 1809 – President of the United States
Despite the misconception of some Americans, Jefferson was not a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, which convened in Philadelphia on May 14, 1787 – without sufficient delegates to constitute a quorum - to revise the original Articles of Confederation. The document was debated and agreed to in secret and finally signed on September 17. Jefferson, who was serving in Paris, attempted to maintain on-going correspondence with several delegates, especially James Madison. His greatest (and most enduring) contribution to the Constitution was his continued insistence on the need for a Bill of Rights.
Nonetheless, although the Enlightenment played a significant role in forming Jefferson’s attitude toward slavery, by the early 1790s he had become pragmatic. In October 2012, journalist and historian Henry Wiencek, writing in The Smithsonian noted:
“The critical turning point in Jefferson’s thinking may well have come in 1792. As Jefferson was counting-up the agricultural profits and losses of his plantation in a letter to President Washington that year, it occurred to him that there was a phenomenon he had perceived at Monticello but never actually measured. He proceeded to calculate it in a barely legible, scribbled note in the middle of a page, enclosed in brackets. What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, ‘I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.’ His plantation was producing inexhaustible human assets. The percentage was predictable.
“In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses ‘should have been invested in negroes.’ He advises that if the friend’s family had any cash left, ‘every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.’”
With trans-Atlantic slave trade eliminated in 1808, Virginia eventually became the primary supplier of enslaved labor to other states – exporting nearly one million men, women and children between 1820 and 1860. Jefferson engaged in this market – buying, selling, mortgaging, and leasing enslaved people to enrich himself and maintain his social status. He also claimed that his efforts were designed to shield his slaves from the most “evil” market of all – the slave trade that tore families apart.
His pragmatism led to the recognition that slaves could generate a profit without having to sell them. Hiring presented a hopeful prospect – allowing him to retain ownership and possible free his slaves in the future. “In a question between hiring and selling them [slaves] (one of which is necessary)… hiring will be temporary only, and will end in their happiness” – the ability to remain with their families. “If we sell them, they will likely be subject to ill usage without a prospect of change” and “be sold southward… we cannot guard the negroes against ill usage,” he wrote Nicholas Lewis on July 29, 1787.
While Jefferson initially rented, leased and mortgaged slaves and gave others as collateral, between 1784 and 1794 he sold 84; he sold 31 in 1785; sold 29 in December 1791 for over $4,000 and another 11 the following year for $2000, and 13 in January 1792. But his sales were never enough to eliminate his debts. Unhappily, for Jefferson and his slaves, his indebtedness overwhelmed him. By the time of his death in 1826, he owed more than $107,000 – more than $3 million today - and his white heirs put 100 men, women and children on the auction block in 1827 and 33 more in 1829.
Because his estate was so deeply in debt, a permanent grave marker – an obelisk designed by the author of the Declaration of Independence – was not erected until 1837 – seven years after his death. He left precise instructions - “By these instructions I have lived and desire most to be remembered.
Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom
and Father of the University of Virginia”
There is no mention of some of his other accomplishments and services: Third President of the United States; principal negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the young nation; proposer of building an interstate highway system; advocate for using a decimal system for American currency; founder of the United States Military Academy at West Point; or his donation of his personal library to the United States government as the nucleus of the Library of Congress.
There is also no mention of him owning, leasing and selling Black men and women as slaves or fathering six children by a Black slave thirty years young than him.
All of that is a part of Jefferson’s history and the result of events that began on August 20, 1607 – “a date that will live in infamy.”
It’s part of American history. We can’t run from it. We cannot hide from it. We should not be ashamed of or frightened by it. And we should not shield our children from this truth of history – no matter how young they are.