Henry and others, thank you for an eye-opening thread. The extent of
the intra-plantation economic networks you've unearthed at Monticello
is surely news to many of us, and I look forward to learning more.
At one point Henry wrote:
"A number of Jefferson's people received
regular gratuities, and others got a cut of profits from nailmaking,
coopering, charcoal burning, etc. as an incentive. It's an interesting
contrast with GW's practices at Mount Vernon, where it seems GW never
paid a
farthing to a slave for anything."
I wonder to what degree these practices varied by region? Whether, for
example, the Monticello example was more or less typical of large
Piedmont plantations and Mount Vernon comparably typical of large
plantations in the older-established Tidewater? On the other hand,
Martha Katz-Hyman wrote:
"In my research for preparing the furnishing plan for the Carter's Grove
Slave Quarter, I found many references to slaves earning money by
selling
chickens, cider, wheat, oysters and hogs, among other things, making
stools
and other furniture, sewing, or doing other extra work."
So perhaps Mount Vernon was an exception within its region . . . or
Carter's Grove was?
Needless to say, one perennial pitfall for those of us who use the
lives and records of the Founders and other much-studied persons in our
research is to assume that their habits, attitudes, and practices
reflect on them primarily as individuals. Instead, they may have been
typical for people of that time and place -- we just don't have
comparable records, or at least a comparable body of scholarship,
concerning the great man's (or woman's) neighbors and other social
peers.
I believe that Jillian Galle, an archaeologist at Monticello, is
currently directing some of her research toward learning how slaves
participated in the burgeoning consumer economy of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century. See the superb database she and her
colleagues have developed, http://www.daacs.org/, for some of the
evidence. Jillian's work, too, should make fascinating reading once it
is published.
-- Jurretta Heckscher
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