Henry Wiencek Responds to His Critics
The author of a new book about Thomas Jefferson makes his case and defends his scholarship
- By Smithsonian.com
- Smithsonian.com, November 14, 2012, Subscribe
The cover story of Smithsonian’s October 2012 issue, “Master of Monticello” by Henry Wiencek, presented a new and controversial portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Wiencek writes that the founding father was far from a reticent slaveholder but instead was heavily involved and invested in maximizing profits at his slave-dependent estate. Since the release of Wiencek’s book of the same name (and which provided the excerpt for the magazine), a new controversy has arisen, this time about the accuracy and diligence of Wiencek’s scholarship.
Writing for Slate, Jefferson historian Annette Gordon-Reed writes, “Suffice it to say that the problems with Master of the Mountain are too numerous to allow it to be taken seriously as a book that tells us anything new about Thomas Jefferson and slavery, and what it does say is too often wrong.” Gordon-Reed assails Wiencek’s analysis of the“4 percent theorem,” Jefferson’s calculation that he was earning a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children, arguing that no such theorem ever existed. “Jefferson’s thoughts about slavery cannot be treated in such a reductive manner,” writes Gordon-Reed.
In the Daily Beast, author and history professor Jan Ellen Lewis shows similar objections. “Much of what Wiencek presents as “new information” has already been published in the groundbreaking work of Annette Gordon-Reed, Lucia Stanton, and others, while the most headline-grabbing charges crumble under close scrutiny,” writes Lewis.
We also received responses via mail from two other esteemed Jefferson scholars. Lucia Stanton, Monticello’s Shanon Senior Historian and author of Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Monticello, and White McKenzie Wallenborn, another Monticello historian. Both objected to Wiencek’s dismissive take on the scholarship of professor Edwin Betts, calling it “unfair” and “malicious.” “Wiencek has used a blunt instrument to reduce complex historical issues to unrecognizable simplicities,” writes Stanton in a letter submitted to The Hook newspaper.
We asked Wiencek to respond to his detractors here and hope that it will continue the dialogue about Jefferson and his contradictory record as a slaveholder and as the author of the phrase “all men are created equal.”
From Henry Wiencek:
Two Jefferson scholars posted critiques of my Smithsonian magazine excerpt and my book, Master of the Mountain. Writing in The Daily Beast, Prof Jan Ellen Lewis expressed disbelief at my statement, "In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated by a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas Jefferson." Lewis misunderstood my point. I was referring to the statement by Jefferson's grandson that not just
Sally Hemings but another Hemings woman also had children who clearly resembled Jefferson. Scholars have not been able to identify that other woman, her children, or the father. I've never seen an explanation.
Lewis sharply questioned my statement that just after the American Revolution "Virginia came close to outlawing the continuation of slavery." I based that statement on solid sources. I quoted from George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights: "all men are equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they can not by any Compact, deprive or divest their Posterity."
I also cited the distinguished scholar Eva Sheppard Wolf: "Several Revolutionary-era Virginia laws seemed to signal a shift toward anti-slavery policies that could have led to universal emancipation." Wolf also writes that some historians "see several indications that it was possible to end American slavery in the late eighteenth century.") This surge of liberal sentiment was short-lived--but it should be noted that Virginia passed a very liberal manumission law in 1782, by which Jefferson could have freed slaves.
It has taken me a while to respond to Prof. Annette Gordon-Reed's comments in Slate because she raised a question that led me to take a fresh look at one of my interpretations.
Her most important point concerns what I call in my book Jefferson's "4 percent theorem" or "formula," calculating the yearly increase in the plantation's black population and counting it as part of its profits. She said it doesn't exist: "Jefferson had no '4 percent theorem' or 'formula.'" But here is the sentence that Jefferson wrote in the middle of a profit-and-loss memo: "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 meaning is perfectly plain.
Elsewhere Gordon-Reed admitted that the formula did exist, but argued that it didn't mean what I thought it did: "The problem with what Wiencek calls the '4 percent theorem' or 'formula' is that Jefferson was not speaking about his slaves at Monticello—he was speaking about farms in Virginia generally." That observation gave me pause. If Gordon-Reed is correct, then as early as 1792 Jefferson saw that all or most Virginia slaveholders were already participating in the "branch of profit" that his grandson Jeff Randolph was to denounce 40 years later: "It is a practice, and an increasing practice, in parts of Virginia, to rear slaves for market." Virginia, Randolph said, "had been converted into one grand menagerie." But I don't believe Jefferson had that in mind, and I still think that he was referring only to the birth rate, and concomitant profit, at Monticello: "I could only, for facts, recur to my own recollections," he wrote later when he explained his calculations.
Here is another statement by Jefferson (not mentioned by Gordon-Reed): He wrote in 1794 that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses "should have been invested in negroes," and if that 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." Given these remarks, it is hard to know why Gordon-Reed has insisted that Jefferson "had no epiphany . . . that the babies of enslaved women increased his capital."
I should mention that neither the 4 percent formula nor Jefferson's callous advice to invest in Negroes has been mentioned by any other writer on Jefferson, and not by Gordon-Reed, though in her review she asserted that "all of the important stories in this book have been told by others."
Gordon-Reed the law professor had some fun with the tragic fate of Kosciuszko's will, and may have befuddled the jury with irrelevancies. Long story short: In his will Thaddeus Kosciuszko left Jefferson a very large sum of money to free his slaves ("I beg Mr. Jefferson," he wrote, to free his slaves and give them land); Jefferson declined to carry out the will. Gordon-Reed's position is that this was a non-issue because the will was fatally defective. But Jefferson's grandson didn't think so: Just months after Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, Jeff Randolph tried to revive the Kosciuszko bequest, "to save some of the Slaves left by Mr Jefferson, from a Sale by his creditors." Jeff Randolph was not deterred by any potential financial risks such as Gordon-Reed darkly evoked.
Furthermore, Thomas Jefferson himself thought the will would stand. When Jeff Randolph made his enquiry about saving slaves in 1826, the will's administrator, Benjamin L. Lear, replied that "I had a conversation with Mr Jefferson on the subject at Monticello about three years ago, in wh: he approved very heartily the plan I then proposed to adopt"-- a plan to free slaves from elsewhere, not Monticello. Jefferson had no interest in releasing his extremely valuable slaves, but he believed the bequest was perfectly valid.
Gordon-Reed reasonably questioned my reading of a Monticello expense ledger that to my mind recorded the purchase of neck shackles for slaves. I explain my interpretation in my book and stand by it.
I am not surprised that Gordon-Reed disliked my book so much, given that it systematically demolishes her portrayal of Jefferson as a kindly master of black slaves. In The Hemingses of Monticello, she described with approval Jefferson's "plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory." Gordon-Reed cannot like the now established truth that
the locus of Jefferson's "kinder, gentler slavery" was the very place where children were beaten to get them to work. At first I assumed that she simply did not know about the beatings, but when I double-checked her book's references to the nailery I discovered that she must have known: A few hundred pages away from her paean to the nail factory, she cited the very letter in which "the small ones" are described as being lashed there.
In her review, Gordon-Reed mocked me for "cataloging the injustices to the enslaved people as if they had finally, after all these years, found a champion." I have never had the arrogance to regard myself as a champion of the enslaved people; but if an esteemed historian goes around talking about "kinder, gentler slavery," they surely need one.
Read Lucia Stanton's critique »
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Comments (18)
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This controversy is a reminder of the old comment about fights in academia, that they are so fierce because the stakes are so small!
Posted by Lynn Thiebout on January 4,2013 | 07:20 AM
Had America not succeeded in aggressively marketing its "Founding Fathers" as cartoonish demigods, the truth about Jefferson would be less difficult to ascertain and less uncomfortable to accept. A comprehensive, objective examination of his (or ANY person's) true character requires suspending modern-day socio-political beliefs -- including our addiction to slapping overly-simplistic labels on people -- and above all by remembering that human lives are complex, quirky and sometimes ultimately self-contradictory when viewed in retrospect. I'd love to see what picture an FBI profiler might paint of Mr. Jefferson. IMHO, anyone who literally cut-and-pasted together his own personal version of the Bible (as Jefferson did) could conceivably have been capable of construing the way he dictated the lives of his slaves as charitable. And though it took two centuries for DNA tests to prove it, we now know for certain that Jefferson DID father children with his slave Sally Hemmings. I think it sheds considerable light on the above debate that Jefferson could have a long-term relationship/affair with one of his slaves and even sire children with her yet never grant her freedom.
Posted by Catty Ninetails on December 10,2012 | 07:00 PM
"What self-absorbed folly to attempt to hold Jefferson to the mores of the modern age." What a self-absorbed folly to believe morality changes like the fashion of every new season.
Posted by Klaus Smith on December 9,2012 | 10:49 PM
While the historians quoted on these pages make their rather competitive statements about the evidence of hypocrisy and self-serving ways of Jefferson, in his individual dealings, another extolled historian indulges himself in a sweeping statement that dismisses, on the sole weight of similar evidence as cited by his peers, the entire significance of a holistically thorough history of Jefferson and his peers. Descending into nothing short of suspiciously pointed propaganda, he gushes: If there was “treason against the hopes of the world,” it was perpetrated by the founding generation,which failed to place the nation on the road to liberty for all. No one bore a greater responsibility for that failure than the master of Monticello. “(P.Finkelman) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opinion/the-real-thomas-jefferson.html?_r=0 How splendid it is that he sneaks a stab at every bit of evidence, of every intention of all the Founders to build the very road he claims was closed to "the nation" (oh..and the world..their hopes) by the Founders individual failures in their personal, societal, and business dealings. Finkelman's skunkweed revisionist garden is fertilized by the vain sophistry naively promoted by his quarreling "peers". Grammar school students have had a more enlightened view than I am seeing here, of the overarching problems of bringing liberty, democracy and equality into fruition over time. The founding assemblage was bold enough to address these issues unsolved for millenia, if only with a pen and the risk of of their very lives. I'd say it was sad that these people didn't live for 200 years, but if they had, so would all of you. Then I'd fear for my grandchildren's values. I can accept the paralyzed paradigm of the pedantic, but it is unacceptable for their ivy-covered edifice to give shelter to a snake like Finkelman.
Posted by Joyce Clemons on December 8,2012 | 05:33 AM
Though I am not a historian, and I have not read all the material that is available on Jefferson, I was surprised at the degree of his involvement with the slaves in the nailery. I had not been aware of the business side of this endeavor ----the amount of profit from sales outside the farm. I had thought that all the efforts of the slaves were used for maintenance of the property, and to serve the needs of the family----crops, cooking, creating tools, etc. The contrast between Washington's freeing of his slaves, and Jefferson's freeing of only certain ones which resulted in separation of families, leaves Jefferson with a smudge on his name. However, his other outstanding attributes do outweigh this unfortunate lapse. The fact remains that he could have done something about his slaves, and he chose not to change the convenient status quo. With all his glowing accomplishments, he was , after all , a man subject to some human faults. I think the end result is that I admire George Washington and John Adams more than Thomas Jefferson.
Posted by Randolph McCreight on December 5,2012 | 06:24 AM
What self-absorbed folly to attempt to hold Jefferson to the mores of the modern age. We may as reasonably leap forward 230 years from now and observe how Americans then will look back on the barbarity and moral liquidity of Roe v Wade and lament: how could they have possibly been so willfully ignorant, cruel and duplicitous? How could they have been so blind to the humanity wronged?
Posted by William Slusher on December 4,2012 | 02:34 PM
Bravo Henry!! It is so refreshing in this post racial era where far too many whites and Black apologists lack the courage and integrity to acknowledge and confront the depths of inhumanity of so many of our historical heroes. Gordon-Reed if she had any integrity and courage would admit her whitewashing of Jefferson was wrong. Yet intellectual cowardice still stains so many in the world of history. Bravo Henry!!
Posted by Greg Thrasher on December 3,2012 | 10:59 PM
It seems as if Ms. Stanton might be of a mind that slavery, if practiced under certain terms, might also be considered a "noble art".
Posted by Timothy Kurt on December 3,2012 | 09:27 PM
Ms. Stanton's comments are disgusting. An order to refrain from whipping the children "except 'in extremeties'" is an order to whip children. Period. Oh, but wait, the children aren't 10, they're 12 & 13? Sick. Tyring to obsure the fact that they're 12 & 13, by saying, instead, they are "about to be thirteen and fourteen"? Sick. And, defending it all by saying "we all know that the whip was the universal tool of slave discipline"? Sick.
Posted by John Stephens on December 2,2012 | 08:42 PM
Is it possible that the writer here, who is described on the net as "Monticello’s Shannon Senior Historian" is perhaps a little too close to Monticello for the proper persective herself? When I go to the Montecello org webpages I read in one article they publish on the web the following "To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves." Freedom is indivisible, democracy cannot make compromises in which a free class lives alongside an enslaved one. Writing from the opposite extreme of detachment, I live in Australia, this Montecello approach reads to me as bosh - and I am left thinking that Wiencek is really under attack for exposing over two centuries of hypocrisy. We have similar problems here with our own history. Our histories are components of the same scenario, the rise and eventual fall of the British Empire, which in common with other European Empires was largely about repression, slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples- and a process of decolonisation that will not be completed, including in the Americas, until racism is eradicated and we all share, as brothers, one history of humanity. Reconciliation requires honesty, integrity and a common purpose. History is about facts not blame.
Posted by Phil on December 1,2012 | 08:47 PM
It is interesting that Monticello's web page on Jefferson and Slavery-- http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-slavery --does not mention any of these "troubling events in which Jefferson was involved" which Ms. Stanton mentions: "the flogging of James Hubbard, the selling south of Cary “in terrorem” to his fellow nailers, the addition to capital through slave childbirth." Indeed this web page begins with the statement that "Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery his whole life" and carries forward with this theme throughout. Do Ms. Stanton and her former colleagues at Monticello believe that the 600+ human beings that Jefferson owned would agree with the statement that Jefferson opposed slavery his whole life? Clearly, the view of slavery held by some Jefferson scholars and the staff at Monticello needs to change, no surprise to those of us who have visited Monticello over the years. (When I visited 20 years ago, the word "slave" was not mentioned on the house tour. Slaves who worked in the house were called "house servants.") So thank you, Mr. Wiencek, for writing a more accurate view of Jeffeson and slavery. With Master of the Mountain as a guide, I remain hopeful that, in time, the Monticello website will be rewritten, and this national monument will also become a place of remembrance for the 600 men, women, and children who lived, worked, and died in bondage there. Each of them should a have plaque. Perhaps Monticello will see fit to conduct a ceremony some 4th of July--at the time of the naturalization ceremony that takes place there each year--to symbolically free all of Jefferson's slaves.
Posted by Crito on November 30,2012 | 09:09 AM
To demonize T.J. because he owned slaves is a shallow view put forth by the self proclaimed, “more highly evolved”. Henry Wiencek’s new portrait decision is his decision. It is not a decision for all as to the character of Thomas Jefferson. Many readers enlightened by 200 years of progress in human kind are influenced, by this article, to judge T.J. as a poor example of their modern standards. Many others have an understanding of the changes in education and values throughout history. In defense of Mr. Jefferson from those who choose to call him a hypocrite, equality for Americans is a word that has been expanded in its definition since the founding of our country, 236 years ago. For T.J. and many of our Founding Fathers, the phrase "...that all men are created equal..." meant that "all free, property-owning males are created equal". Fortunately for all races and both sexes, the United States has moved to achieve full legal equality since that time. Every generation is a victim of its vices, misunderstandings and Doctors of Egotism. Be careful and sparing of judgment, especially of national icons. This practice is capable of national degradation. Our Founding Fathers were men of sufficient capability to bequeath to us a nation that has been the leader of the free world. It is the responsibility of academia to keep it so, not to strap young minds with clouds of guilt over imagined sins. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams passed away within hours of one another on July 4th 1826, fifty years, from the day they declared our nation’s independence. Many consider this a sign of divine intervention. Methinks T.J. has friends in high places. Noticed any swarms of locust or dark clouds following you around, Wiencek; any close calls with lightning strikes? Be careful out there.
Posted by Tom Rackham on November 26,2012 | 11:39 PM
Wiencek: "I quoted from George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights: 'all men are equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they can not by any Compact, deprive or divest their Posterity.'" But when Mason set his hand to a constitution for the state, he added the key phrase "When in a state of society" to "all men." A slave holder himself, he hated the institution in the abstract but availed himself of its benefits in practice. Thus he is closer to Wiencek's Jefferson and Washington than to Malone's--ironic then that he uses the Mason quote to show how close Va was to ending slavery. One further note, on the corporal chastisement of boys who did not show up for work. Not only young slaves, but apprentices, servants, and even free children were rountinely "whpped" (not with a whip, of course, but with a switch or some other "rod") in that "spare the rod and spoil the child" era. Best, Peter
Posted by Peter Hoffer on November 26,2012 | 04:48 PM
I just now finished Wiencek's riveting (and depressing) "Master of the Mountain," and I agree with JohnD's posting below. None of the critics that I have read have been able to undercut Wiencek's central thesis: that Jefferson had the opportunity to make a difference, to make a stand, on the issue of slavery but, after the 1780s, refused to do so. Instead, he continued to pay lip service--for whatever reasons--to the horrors of slavery but continued, also, to live a lavish lifestyle (possible only by the use of slave labor) which left his heirs in debt and the slaves who had devoted their lives and their children's lives to his comfort facing the auction block upon his death. And what do Wiencek's critics have to say about Jefferson's support of slavery in the new Louisiana Territory?
Posted by Carolyn M. on November 21,2012 | 06:47 PM
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