The mechanisms of monticello: Saving labor in Jefferson's America

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 377-418

  Hodin, Stephen B ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 70449985609     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2006.0049     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. See Jack McLaughlin's To His Excellency Thomas Jefferson: Letters to a President (New York, 1991), 217-60
2. For Redheffer's mechanical ruse, see Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume's Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession (New York, 1977), ch. 8
3. See also Stanley W. Angrist "Perpetual Motion Machines," Scientific American, 218 (Jan. 1968), 114-22
4. Thomas Jefferson [hereafter referred to as TJ] to Dr. Robert Patterson, Dec. 27, 1812, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (20 vols., Washington, DC, 1907), 13: 192-93
5. On the relationship between language, performance, and culture in the late eighteenth century, see Jay Fliegelman's Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA, 1993)
6. On the intrinsic connection between the material and the textual in cultural studies, see Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (New York, 1992)
7. and Cecelia Tichi's Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987)
8. For general studies of slavery in Jefferson's America, see David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (New York, 1999)
9. and Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery/American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975)
10. Free Some Day: The African-American Families at Monticello (Charlottesville, VA, 2000)
11. and the fine essay "'Those Who Labor for My Happiness': Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves," in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter Onuf (Charlottesville, VA, 1993),147-80
12. For quotation, see Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, ed. Peden, 87
13. For Jefferson's views on how best to achieve an abolition of slavery, see "51. A Bill Concerning Slaves," in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (28 vols. to date, Princeton, NJ, 1950-), 2: 470
14. Two historians have established the ground upon which much of the subsequent debate over Jefferson's public policies concerning slavery has been played out. See Jordan's White Over Black, 429-65
15. and William Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York, 1990), 122-57
16. On social and economic development in the early Republic, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980)
17. See Joyce Appleby's "Commercial Farming and the 'Agrarian Myth' in the Early Republic," Journal of American History, 68 (1982), 833-49
18. The Monticello Research Department has compiled much of the relevant information concerning the DNA testing and its correlation to the applicable historical research in a useful website: http://www.monticello.org/plantation/ hemings_resource.html. The watershed event was the publication of the DNA evidence and its scientific conclusions in the journal Nature
19. See E.A. Foster et al., "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child," Nature (Nov. 5, 1998), 27-28
20. The Madison Hemings quotation can be found in "Reminiscences of Madison Hemings," appended to Fawn M. Brodie's Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History (New York, 1974), 474. Brodie's biography is the first by a modern historian to consider the Jefferson-Hemings relationship seriously and argue persuasively for its occurrence
21. For biographers who have examined the role of the nailery in Jefferson's life from a deeper psychological and cultural perspective, see Jack McLaughlin's Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York, 1988) 110-11
22. and Joseph J. Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 166-70
23. See also related memoranda in James A. Bear, Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson's Memorandum Booh: Accounts with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767-1826 (Princeton, NJ, 1997)
24. On the ways that capitalism and slavery accommodated one another, see Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, MA, 1974), especially 191-257
25. For quotation, see Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 384
26. See also John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Volume 1: Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850 (New York, 1995)
27. James Oakes's The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982), 153-91
28. Eugene D. Genovese's The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1967)
29. For the emergence of labor and class relations under free market capitalism in the north, see Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984)
30. On the way slavers appropriated paternalism within a largely capitalistic driven system, reducing slaves bodies to mere merchandise, see Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999)
31. Betts, Farm Book, facsimile p. 77
32. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, 16
33. On early labor commemorations, see Susan G. Davis's Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA, 1986)
34. and Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 21-54
35. John M. Murrin, "Fundamental Values, The Founding Fathers, and the Constitution," in To Form a More Perfect Union: The Critical Ideas of the Constitution, eds. Herman Belz, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA, 1992), 1-37
36. and Oakes, The Ruling Race, 156-60
37. Both quotations can be found in Peterson, Visitors to Monticello, 47; 35
38. See Clay's "Speech on Domestic Manufactures" [Mar. 26, 1810], in Hopkins, Papers of Henry Clay, 1: 459-63
39. David Freeman Hawke, Nuts and Bolts of the Past: A History of American Technology, 1776-1860 (New York, 1988), 43
40. Howard Temperley, "Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology," Past and Present, 75 (1977), 94-118
41. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds. Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkestone, UK, 1980)
42. On the plantation or family farm as a model for the nation and Monticello, see Dell Upton's chapter "An American Icon," in Architecture in the United States (New York, 1998), 17-55
43. See also Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 218-33
44. For the quotation, see Ruth Schwartz Cowan's A Social History of American Technology (New York, 1997), 70, italics hers
45. Cowan's A Social History of American Technology, 69-76
46. and Hawke's Nuts and Bolts of the Past, 56-62
47. Oliver Evans, The Young Mill-Wright and Miller's Guide (New York, 1972)
48. Hawke, Nuts and Bolts of the Past, 59
49. Zachariah Allen, The Science of Mechanics, as Applied to the Present Improvements in the Useful Arts in Europe, and in the United States of America (Providence, RI, 1829), 246
50. Dumas Malone's Jefferson and the Rights of Man (Boston, MA, 1951), 284-85
51. and Silvio A. Bedini's Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (New York, 1990), 176-87 and 441-43
52. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York, 1992), 37
53. The "artisan extraordinaire" quotation is Laura Rigal's. See Rigal, The American Manufactory, 97
54. See Sowerby's Catalogue, 3: 16
55. See Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract [1760], in The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 260
56. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1793], in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York, 1971), 398
57. For the ideas in this section, I am indebted to Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD, 1986)
58. See Sowerby, Catalogue, 2: 14 and 3: 438
59. See Peterson, Visitors to Monticello, 72
60. On the spirited and celebratory nature of harvesting in the plantation South, see Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 315-24
61. and Stanton, Free Some Day, 69-70
62. There is no consensus among historians of American technology and industrialization about what constitutes the earliest form of modern machine age mass production. Hounshell traces their origins back to early American workshops and slaughterhouses, emphasizing the sequential organization of single purpose machinery as a critical element in this evolution. See David A. Hounshell's From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, 1984), 1-65
63. On the rich body of work exploring the origins of the factory system and the grand transformation in labor relations and the nature of work that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, see Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963)
64. and "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present, 38 (1967), 56-97
65. For the American context, see Herbert G. Gutman's "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919," American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 531-88
66. and Nathan Rosenberg's "Technological Change in the Machine Tool Industry, 1840-1910," Journal of Economic History, 23 (1963), 414-43
67. See also Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post, eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures (Washington, DC, 1981)
68. and Barbara J. Heath, Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest (Charlottesville, VA, 1999), 24-26
69. Final quotation in Ann Finer and George Savage, eds., Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood (London, 1965), 82-83, italics his
70. See also Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (London, 1986), 33
71. I have based my discussion of Cyrus McCormick and his harvesting machines from two helpful sources. See Hawke, Muts and Bolts of the Past, 137-41
72. and Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 153-88
73. See Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 249, italics his
74. See Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology, 3
75. Quoted in Cadwallader David Colden, The Life of Robert Fulton, by his friend Cadwallader D. Colden. Read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York. Comprising some account of the invention, progress, and establishment of steam boats. With an appendix (New York, 1817), 219