The material world of the Jeffersons at Shadwell

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 62, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 213-242

  Kern, Susan ^a  

^a Dept of Economics and Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary

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EID: 45949088322     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491600     Document Type: Review

References (80)

1. In 1909 William Thornton established an oppositional relationship when he proclaimed that Thomas Jefferson bore the "plebian red [blood] of Peter and the aristocratic blue of Jane." Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960), 418-20 (quotation, 248)
2. traced the popular embrace of this view even after the complete scholarly repudiation of it by Marie Kimball, who certified Peter Jefferson's gentry status in Jefferson, the Road to Glory, 1743 to 1776 (New York, 1943)
3. see also Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston, 1948), chaps. 1-2
4. Most scholars cite Malone on the parentage of Thomas Jefferson, but, as Malone was, they are left with Fiske Kimball's tentative 1943 thesis about Shadwell and the material circumstances of earlier Jeffersons (more following, esp. footnote 4). For instance, Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York, 1974), esp. chap. 2, pursued the oppositional line set up by Thornton
5. Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 12-15 (quotation, 12), embraces Peter as a "self-reliant frontiersman."
6. Others acknowledge the gentry Peter Jefferson but temper his status. For instance, Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York, 1985), 1-3 (quotation, 3), highlights Peter's "own exertions" as his identifying characteristic
7. Noble E. Cunningham Jr., In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Baton Rouge, La., 1987), 1, calls Shadwell "a modest frame house," and describes Peter as "a rising young planter."
8. Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 26, uses "moderately successful" to describe Peter
9. When Peter Jefferson died, Albemarle Co. was a frontier of settlement and a politically and socially immature region; its final boundaries were determined in 1777 and its political center relocated in 1761. Except for its wealthiest residents, most people in Albemarle Co. had only limited access to markets. For various definitions of frontier, see Gregory H. Nobles, "Breaking into the Backcountry: New Approaches to the Early American Frontier, 1750-1800," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 46, no. 4 (October 1989): 641-70
10. for a discussion of the market accessibility model of the frontier, see John Solomon Otto, The Southern Frontiers, 1607-1860: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South (Westport, Conn., 1989), esp. 1-8, 24-26
11. Early in the twentieth century, politically liberal scholars and politicians described Jefferson as being born of an overseer class, a characterization made to ennoble the everyman as a descendant of common American beginnings, but colonial revival conservatism responded with a desire to pedigree great American patriots. See Peterson, Jefferson Image, esp. 324, chaps. 5-7
12. For the comment about the Palladian plan: Kimball to Shadwell project architect, ca. 1954, interview with Floyd E. Johnson, FAIA, August 1996. Kimball excavated the mid-eighteenth-century brick cellar that he called an outbuilding, the later eighteenth-century stone cellar that he thought might be part of the early Jefferson house (he made the incorrect assumption that stone would be necessarily earlier construction than brick), and the two kitchen-related hearths nearby and based on the extent of the buildings he declared that there was little evidence that Jefferson was "a son of the frontier." See Fiske Kimball, "In Search of Jefferson's Birthplace," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 51, no. 4 (October 1943): 312-25, esp. 324-25 (quotations, 319, 325)
13. Kimball's interpretation via Malone has been augmented only by Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York, 1988), 39-40, who sets up a formalistic contrast between Shadwell and Monticello
14. The most visible houses such as Rosewell and Westover were extraordinary creations of a very few wealthy families - the economic and architectural outliers. In eighteenth-century Virginia Gazette advertisements, 84 percent of houses that listed dimensions had fewer than 1,000 square feet of living space; more than half had less than 600 square feet. Ninety percent were built of wood or were wood with masonry features such as a chimney or foundation. Camille Wells, "The Planter's Prospect: Houses, Outbuildings, and Rural Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," Winterthur Portfolio 28, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 1-31, esp. table 6, fig. 9
15. Thomas Jefferson did not use the word frontier, but described what historians now call a frontier of settlement. Jefferson, "The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson," in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York, 1944), 4
16. Jefferson's nineteenth-century biographers used wilderness and primeval forest to describe early Albemarle Co. The post-Turner Jefferson historians use frontier and often link Jefferson to the idea that the frontier offered a climate for growth of democratic ideals because of the interaction of people of different social ranks in a still-forming community. See, for instance, Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 4, 33
17. Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), 1: 11-12
18. For the career of Jefferson as a child of the frontier, see Peterson, Jefferson Image, 248-49, 324-25, 418-19, 454
19. Robert Rose recorded a three-day journey between Albemarle Courthouse and Tuckahoe, in Goochland Co., still only halfway to Williamsburg. Ralph Emmett Fall, ed., The Diary of Robert Rose: A View of Virginia by a Scottish Colonial Parson, 1746-1751 (Verona, Va., 1977), 60
20. In 1750 Peter Fontaine complained that from Westover in Charles City Co. it took two months to send and receive correspondence from his son who lived sixty miles "in the woods." James Fontaine, Memoirs of a Huguenot Family (1852; repr., New York, 1907), 338 (quotation, 337)
21. There are few studies of the Piedmont, and fewer still that include or compare the tidewater and the Piedmont. Those (in the forefront) have focused on the movement of slaves and slavery from tidewater west. Backcountry studies generally center on Virginia's Shenandoah Valley region, though the southside (Piedmont south of the James River) has been included in a few. On the Piedmont, see Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986)
22. Philip D. Morgan, "Slave Life in Piedmont Virginia, 1720-1800," in Colonial Chesapeake Society, ed. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 433-84
23. Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls, "Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 1720-1790," WMQ 46, no. 2 (April 1989): 211-51
24. Michael L. Nicholls, "Piedmont Plantations and Farms: Transplanting Tidewater Traditions?" Magazine of Albemarle County History 49 (1991): 1-17
25. See also S. Edward Ayres, "Albemarle County, Virginia, 1744-1770: An Economic, Political, and Social Analysis" (master's thesis, University of Virginia, 1968)
26. There are no intact Piedmont buildings as early as Shadwell, and little archaeology that falls in the same period; however, recent archaeological work at Montpelier in Orange Co., Virginia, has the potential to furnish some material for comparison early settlers who were well-off. On the backcountry, see Albert H. Tillson Jr., "The Southern Backcountry: A Survey of Current Research," VMHB 98, no. 3 (July 1990): 387-422
27. see also Turk McCleskey, "Rich Land, Poor Prospects: Real Estate and the Formation of a Social Elite in Augusta County, Virginia, 1738-1770," VMHB 98, no. 3 (July 1990): 449-86
28. Warren R. Hofstra, "The Virginia Backcountry in the Eighteenth Century: The Question of Origins and the Issue of Outcomes," VMHB 101, no. 4 (October 1993): 485-508
29. Michael Lee Nicholls, "Origins of the Virginia Southside, 1703-1753: A Social and Economic Study" (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1972)
30. Thomas Jefferson, "Autobiography," 4 ("third or fourth settler"), 3 ("quite neglected")
31. Goochland Co. Deed Book 3, pt. 2, 535
32. For reconstruction of the Jefferson land deeds, see Kimball, Road to Glory, 17-18, 309-11
33. Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 17-18, 28, 31, 435-39
34. Mary Jo Miles, "Slave Life at Shadwell, 1741-1799" (master's thesis, Oakland University, 1992), 4-5, 7-9
35. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, eds., The Correspondence of John Bartram 1734-1777 (Gainesville, Fla., 1992), 84, 102
36. The material world at Dungeness included extensive gardens enclosed with brick walls, specialized plantation buildings including a coach house, millhouse, well house, and henhouse, horses and a chariot for riding, and family portraits (Goochland Co. Deed Book 2 1734-1736, 259). For a portrait of Isham Randolph, see VMHB 34, no 2 (April 1926): opposite 183
37. Thomas Jefferson's granddaughters reported that Jane was agreeable, intelligent, lively, cheerful, humorous, fond of writing letters, and wrote readily and well (Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, 1: 16-17)
38. See also Kimball, Road to Glory, 16
39. Activity at Shadwell during these years included business and social occasions; see Fall, Diary of Robert Rose, 33
40. Edwin Morris Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book, 1766-1824 (Philadelphia, 1944), 1-14
41. Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Page following the fire and lamented the loss "of every pa[per I] had in the world, and almost every book." He estimated the value of the books at £200, and wished all he had lost were the money. Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J., 1950), 1: 35 (quotation, 34)
42. The probate inventories offer snapshots that show the plantation at particular moments, esp. the comprehensive 1757 list of Peter Jefferson's estate. Artifacts and account book entries confirm and augment the inventories. Jane lived at Shadwell for six years following the fire until her death. Her house stood over the western portion of what had been her house with Peter. It was decidedly smaller, yet fashionably furnished. After she died her two minor children lived with siblings. Jane's house is not treated here but in other work by the author, including the Shadwell archaeology reports. Artifacts, field records, and related materials are in the collections of the Monticello Archaeology Department, under whose labor Shadwell was excavated from 1991 to 1995, directed by William Kelso, Barbara Heath, and Susan Kern. See also Susan A. Kern, "Report on Archaeological Investigations at Shadwell, Albemarle County, Virginia, 1991-1995" (Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1996)
43. Kern, "A Report on Archaeological Investigation of a Burial Ground at Shadwell, Virginia, 1992-1993" (Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1994)
44. For a discussion of the Jefferson-era and later mills on the Rivanna River, see Benjamin Peter Ford, "A Profitable and Creditable Establisment [sic]: Industrial Textile Manufacturing and Capitalist Relations of Production in the Antebellum Central Virginia Piedmont" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1998)
45. For earlier excavations, see Kimball, VMHB 51, also footnote 2
46. Paul J. F. Schumacher, "1954 Archeological Exploration at Shadwell: Report on a Field Investigation Made in May 1954 and Conclusions Drawn from This" (Thomas Jefferson Birthplace Memorial Park Commission, 1954, photocopy, collections of Thomas Jefferson Foundation)
47. for sundial, see Peter Jefferson Account Book, 36. Will Rieley, landscape architect and historian at the University of Virginia, helped decipher the landscape plan
48. For consideration of how people move through landscapes and buildings, see Dell Upton, "Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens, Ga., 1986), 315-35, esp. 318-25
49. Upton, "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," in Material Life in America, 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston, 1988), 357-69
50. Mark R. Wenger, "The Central Passage in Virginia: Evolution of an Eighteenth-Century Living Space," in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, II, ed. Camille Wells (Columbia, Mo., 1986), 137-49, esp. 137-39
51. For mulatto slave Sandy, see Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), Sept. 14, 1769
52. Barbara J. Heath, "Buttons, Beads and Buckles: Self Definition within the Bounds of Slavery," in Historical Archaeology, Identity Formation, and the Interpretation of Ethnicity, ed. Maria Franklin and Garrett Fesler (Richmond, Va., 1999), 47-69
53. Games, such as mankala, often were not merely leisure activities but served important social functions by testing and establishing leaders among groups. M. Drake Patten, "African-American Spiritual Beliefs: An Archaeological Testimony from the Slave Quarter," in Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600-1900, ed. Peter Benes, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Boston, 1995), 44-52
54. For medical applications, see Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800 (Washington, D.C., 1992), 116-17
55. These lists of tools reflect the slave quarters on the home plantation and outlying fields. Excavations at Shadwell reflect only the plantation center. Excavations led by Fraser Neiman on the south (Monticello) side of the Rivanna River in the later 1990s uncovered evidence of one of the field quarters. The resulting artifact assemblage revealed the use of utilitarian and tablewares on the site, tobacco smoking, and production of lead shot. Derek Wheeler, Leslie McFaden, and Fraser D. Neiman, "The Early Farm Quarter at Monticello" (paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, January 1999)
56. Rhys Isaac explored the stories, songs, and activities that formed common experiences at plantations such as Shadwell. He proposes that Thomas Jefferson was driven to formally "deny the African part of his upbringing" in his later attitudes toward African Americans because of this early intimacy. Isaac, "The First Monticello," in Onuf, Jeffersonian Legacies, 77-108, esp. 79-81 (quotation, 100-101)
57. See also Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J., 1987), esp. chap. 10, 132-34
58. Even Thomas Jefferson's daughters and granddaughters who grew up in the highly regulated spaces of Monticello remembered the songs and music of the slaves there; see Lucia Stanton, "'Those Who Labor for My Happiness': Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves," in Onuf, Jeffersonian Legacies, 147-80, esp. 166-67
59. Upton, "Domestic Vernacular Architecture," 323-24
60. Wenger, "Central Passage"
61. Mark R. Wenger, "The Dining Room in Early Virginia," in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, III, ed. Thomas Carter and Bernard L. Herman (Columbia, Mo., 1989), 149-59, esp. 153-55
62. Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, "Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake," in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 59-166, esp. tables 1-6, 11
63. Cary Carson, "The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?" ibid., 483-697, esp. 590-91
64. Lorena S. Walsh, "Urban Amenities and Rural Sufficiency: Living Standards and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1643-1777," Journal of Economic History 43, no. 1 (March 1993): 109-17, esp. table 1
65. Wenger, "Dining Room," 153-55
66. Albemarle Co. Will Book 2, 356
67. Wool in dirt was unwashed wool. See James A Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson's Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767-1826 (Princeton, N.J., 1997), 1: 406, n.38
68. For dressing tables, see Peter Jefferson Account Book, 26
69. Harrateen was a worsted wool fabric polished and imprinted with wavy or watery patterns. The cloth usually was a deep, rich red, green, yellow, or blue and, though unspecified in these documents, the chairs and bed most likely matched. See Florence M. Montgomery, Textiles in America, 1650-1870 (New York, 1984), for definition of harrateen, see 35, 256, for Montgomery's assessment of matching materials within rooms based on upholsterer's bills, advertisements, and inventories, see 58
70. For accounts after 1757, see Harvie Accounts, 1757-1765, 4
71. But cultural curiosity was not the only reaction; in 1756 neighbors in Louisa Co. called the news of Indians allied with the French within 75 miles "terrifying," and commented that "no doubt [the Indians'] numbers were greatly augmented by our fears." See "Letters of Francis Jerdone," William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 16, no. 2 (October 1907): 127-28
72. For men like Jefferson, see, for instance, Archibald Henderson, "Dr. Thomas Walker and the Loyal Company of Virginia," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 41 (April 1931): 77-123
73. For the importance of these professionals in the formation and growth of Virginia, see Sarah S. Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen: Land Measuring in Colonial Virginia (Richmond, Va., 1979)
74. Jack Greene argues that people sought visible symbols of improvement as they moved. Landscape historian Barbara Sarudy suggests that fences, garden walls, and hedges demarcated civilized space from wilderness, and gave settlers a feeling of security within safe, familiar bounds. Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 193
75. Barbara Wells Sarudy, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700-1805 (Baltimore, 1998), 45, 150
76. Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, chaps. 1-2, esp. 30, 33
77. The assumption that towns defined culture and that distance from a town was necessarily equal to distance from culture is the reason many historians of the Chesapeake have to first define the region's settlement pattern and lack of towns, and perhaps contrast the relationship of people to towns in New England or in Europe. See, for instance, Rhys Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 13-17
78. Kevin P. Kelly "'In disper'd Country Plantations': Settlement Patterns in Seventeenth-Century Surry County, Virginia," in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, ed. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (New York, 1979), 183-205
79. Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (New York, 1984), esp. 19-25, 47
80. For Francis West, see Peter Jefferson Account Book, 7