TALKING TO MYSELF -- NUANCE LEADERSHIP -- UNMASKING THOMAS JEFFERSON

TALKING TO MYSELF – NUANCE LEADERSHIP – UNMASKING THOMAS JEFFERSON

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 2, 2012

Nuance leadership is a subtle variation of the moral façade of what purports to be leadership. 

Too often what is experienced is not leadership but simply dominance, the top down will of the few over the obligatory compliance of the many.  For centuries, this power construct has sometimes resulted in high crimes and misdemeanors without accompanying consequences.  Take American slavery and the unmasking of Thomas Jefferson as a case in point.

Nuance leadership can also be moralistic. As such, it is likely to be counterintuitive with the many having a dominant voice in affairs.  Over the years, I have practiced a form of nuance leadership with certain success but failure as well, which will be discussed in a future missive.

As I walked today, my mind was preoccupied with Thomas Jefferson and slavery based on an article written by Henry Wiencek that appears in the current issue of The Smithsonian (October 2012, pp 40-49, 92-97).

Jefferson was very much a nuance leader in an amoral sense.  It would be interesting to know if Wiencek’s revelations change your views of the third president (1801-1809) of our Republic once you read this missive. 

THE GENIUS OF JEFFERSON

JFK once flattered a White House dinner party with the comment never had a more able assembly of guests graced this room other than when Jefferson dined alone. 

Historians and intellectuals have echoed these sentiments.  He was a most gifted man and clearly the greatest writer to ever occupy the White House.  Perhaps that is why he has been given a pass on his moral ambivalence when it came to slavery. 

Imagine the boldness of this man to derail Aristotle’s dictum that democracy was meant for a select few and that subjugation was natural for the many. His premise held until 1776.  Jefferson changed that with his words that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence.  He even went further to declare slavery evil and an abomination and should be abolished. 

His genius with words unwittingly led to his duplicity in action.  This allowed him to rationalize that slavery fit naturally into American enterprise.  A Virginia abolitionist once said, “Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do.” 

MASTER OF MONTICELLO

Wiencek profiles Jefferson’s moral ambiguity.  In his lifetime, Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves with at any one time 100 living on his mountain retreat of Monticello. 

Monticello is revealed in dreamy splendor in books and articles, paintings and photographs.  If you have ever been there, you were undoubtedly moved by Jefferson’s cunning mind, inventiveness and architectural and artistic acumen. 

You leave Monticello imagining this landmark a place of culture and sophistication with slaves not really slaves but workers living in comfortable ambience with this fatherly figure.  Wiencek paints a different picture.

Even the facsimile of the Farm Book, which visitors could see was not actually the ledger of Jefferson’s day because it might prove an embarrassment to Jefferson’s legacy. 

The Farm Book recorded the daily activity of slaves from the nail works to the tobacco farms.  Slaves were whipped for poor performance, tardiness, or sloth, but these whippings were not in evidence in the Farm Book.  Nor were the living conditions of the slaves as idyllic as they are shown in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century paintings. 

Jefferson was a conscientious farmer with a keen eye to agricultural profits and losses.  He made a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children.  This found him constantly cajoling black women to have babies.  It increased his profitability.  Slavery was a stable investment strategy. 

He even advised a friend in financial trouble to invest in Negroes.  Jefferson suffered a rebuff from George Washington when he sent his “4 percent” profit formula to him.  Washington would free his slaves because for him slavery had made human beings into money like cattle in the marketplace and this disgusted him.

Jefferson, ever the seer, was correct in seeing slavery the second most valuable capital asset in the United States with the value of slaves three times the amount invested in manufacturing and railroads.  The only asset more valuable than slaves was land.

Surprisingly, he could also be facetious.  While in the Senate with Andrew Jackson, he once told colleagues Jackson was a rash and dangerous man, only to write Jackson years later that he remembered with pleasure their joint labors. 

Jackson also owned slaves, but never apologized for it, or for that matter, anything.  He drove the Indians from their land in the south and resettled them in the northwest.  He could be cruel and was crusty and unfinished, but from his bow an arrow was directed unwaveringly towards its target.  No one could ever accuse him of being Dr. Jekyll one day and Mr. Hyde another, but some were never sure which Jefferson would show up on a certain day. 

JEFFERSON THE AGRARIAN CAPITALIST

The “4 percent” formula that Jefferson had stumbled on became the engine of his enterprise at Monticello.  He used the words “their financial increase” for Negroes to keep himself stuck in slavery. 

As he became increasingly dependent on slaves for the economic survival of Monticello, he drifted away from his eloquent emancipating rhetoric to the sagacity of commercial enterprise.  Yet, ironically, he was almost always in debt, whereas Jackson, a man of no formal education, was of considerable wealth. 

Jefferson's dependence on slavery was never more apparent than in the “nail works.”  Here black boys ages 10, 11 and 12 were whipped to get them motivated to work making nails.  The profit from nail production paid the grocery bills of the mansion.  The whipping of these children was however suppressed from the Farm Book.

Tobacco farming wore out the soil to the point it became fallow.   This forced Jefferson to copy Washington in growing wheat and barley instead, which presented an immediate problem.  Planting, growing and harvesting grain required less Negro workers but workers with more skills: i.e., millers, mechanics, carpenters, smiths, spinners, coopers, plowmen and plow women. 

He designed a comprehensive training program for each of these disciplines.  This included an assessment of talent for each discipline along with an estimation of those who might later qualify to become artisans.  The rest would remain laborers. 

Additionally, he created a comprehensive social and occupational hierarchy for the slaves.  A small minority even received pay and profit sharing while the vast majority received the barest of rations and clothing. 

Jefferson, for all intent and purpose, planned to modernize slavery, to diversify and industrialize it as if it were an engine of industry, which of course it was.  This was particularly true of the nail works.  He sketched out a plan in the Farm Book with children 10 years old to serve as nurses, from 10 to 16, the boys would make nails, the girls would be spinners, and at 16, if they qualified, they would go to ground to learn a trade.

He was insightful to a fault with a particular prescience to efficiency.  This was more than 100 years before the arrival in the twentieth century of the efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor and his “scientific management.” 

He justified this policy with the rationale that idle boys could become a problem.  He saw himself as a motivator, using the “stick & carrot” method (i.e., punishment and award) to motivate.  Boys were whipped if they didn’t turn to, but were given extra food, new clothes and the prospects of learning a trade if they did. 

Two months of labor by the nail boys paid the entire grocery bill for a year for the entire white population at Monticello including all the costs associated with entertainment, which was common.

The winter of 1798 was a significant date.  The lead black foreman of Monticello refused to whip people anymore.  This incensed Jefferson.  He failed to understand that the foreman had lost control of the men and feared for his life. 

The man who replaced this foreman proved far more brutal.  Jefferson saw harsh measures as a necessary cost of doing business, exonerating himself in the affair while claiming he loved industry but hated severity. 

Monticello was his machine, which operated on carefully orchestrated brutality.  His personal extravagance and spendthrift lifestyle justified it otherwise Monticello would fall into bankruptcy.

Jefferson’s character is reminiscent of public figures in our own time.  He could excoriate his overseers as unprincipled, while demanding they get things done whatever the cost. 

Continuing the parallel with today, Jefferson hated conflict and disliked having to punish people, but found ways to distance himself from the violence demanded of the system he had created.

JEFFERSON’S MORAL DILEMMA

Jefferson could show kindness and patience to a point.  One slave in particular continued to runaway despite promising each time not to do so.  The fourth time he ran away and was caught, Jefferson had him flogged, and then sold. 

It would appear Jefferson never felt a moral dilemma despite the evidence to the contrary.  He expected reasonable work from his slaves, and when it was not forthcoming, fully within his rights to have them flogged or sold when they became an unrecoverable expense. 

Most slaves were not flogged, but the majority received only the barest of essentials at best, and no direct pay for their labors.  They were in every sense treated as slaves, and not as men.

You ask yourself, how Jefferson, thought to be the most gifted of his time could not see his moral dilemma.  Flogging does not persuade a man to work; it breaks the spirit and disables the man. 

Another significant date in Jefferson’s legacy is 1817.  This was eight years after he left the presidency.  An old friend, and hero of the American Revolution, a Polish nobleman, bequeathed a substantial fortune to Jefferson to be used to free his slaves and purchase land and farming equipment for them to start a new life as free men and women. 1817 was nine years before his death in 1826.

Jefferson refused the gift although it would have reduced the debt hanging over Monticello.  The catch was that more than half of the gift would have gone to his slaves. He could not see himself getting rid of the skilled workers and artisans that he had developed, which would leave Monticello close to destitute.  

*     *     *

Jefferson is hard to peg as a good or bad man, but not difficult to peg as a complicated and contradictory figure driven by materialism, better known as Americanism.  He was an astute disciplinarian and autodidact in one sense, but lacked the moral rectitude and temperament of his long rival, John Adams, who never owned slaves. 

We have no choice but to judge him by his time and those standards.  When we do, it doesn’t serve his legacy or ours to paint him with faint praise.  Slavery wasn’t a random opportunity. He engaged in slavery knowingly with moral clarity but chose to judge it as pragmatic necessity, while fully acknowledging it as an abomination.  John Brown may have been a madman, but Jefferson was a pusillanimous man. 

Years later a Jefferson slave now free said he never forgot being put on the auction block and sold like a horse (see “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves” by Henry Wiencek © 2012).

*     *     *