In July 1817, Thomas Jefferson, ten of the enslaved people he owned, and his overseer Edmund Bacon visited an abandoned farm two miles west of Charlottesville. This site was soon to become the University of Virginia. On that July day, those ten enslaved people began the process of surveying the land and marking off where the school’s buildings would sit on the farm’s ridgeline.[1] Over the next few years, enslaved people would represent the largest laboring component of the construction project—clearing the land, leveling the ridgeline into a series of terraces, digging foundations, shoveling clay, shaping bricks, firing bricks, quarrying and cutting stone, and literally building the new university. By October 1817, teams of enslaved laborers had been working for over three months building the foundations of the university. For over more than four decades, the enslaved would quietly build, maintain, and shape the university as it grew from a construction project to a school with nearly six hundred students. Throughout that period, the enslaved were vital to the survival of the institution. Reframing the spaces of the Academical Village to highlight their experiences and reinserting their life and labor into a fuller story of the university’s history honors the contributions of the enslaved and provides a robust counterpoint to the racist ideologies prevalent at UVA in its first fifty years.
On October 6, 1817, President James Monroe along with former presidents Madison and Jefferson, participated in a ceremonial laying of the first cornerstone for what would become Pavilion VII, the first completed building at UVA. That very stone had almost certainly been quarried by enslaved men near Lewis Mountain less than a half mile west of the University and also precisely cut by an enslaved stone mason. Eight years later, when the university opened to its first session in fall 1825, there were more enslaved people living and working at the school at that moment than there were students and professors combined. Enslaved people, always comprising a significant percentage of the university’s population, lived and worked in nearly every built space in the Academical Village. Despite that historical reality, an interpretive framework persists that simultaneously centers Jefferson and white men and erases people of color in understanding the university’s first fifty years. Even today in 2018, the Hotel A lower garden wall has a plaque declaring “These garden walls [were] originally designed and built by Thomas Jefferson.”
Slavery and enslaved African Americans literally and figuratively shaped both Thomas Jefferson’s ideas and the University of Virginia profoundly. This should not come as a surprise—UVA was the flagship state university in the largest and most politically important slaveholding state in the United States. In 1820, Virginia was home to over four hundred thousand enslaved people, nearly twice as many as in any other state at the time. Even in 1860, as cotton states’ enslaved populations were growing quickly, Virginia was still home to nearly five hundred thousand enslaved people, almost thirty thousand more than in any other state.[2] The school arose in a Virginia Piedmont county where over half the population was held in bondage and well over half of adult white males owned at least one slave between 1820 and 1860. The enslaved population in Albemarle County grew from over ten thousand in 1820 to just under fourteen thousand in 1860. Only a few other Virginia counties had similar concentrations of both enslaved people and slaveholding.[3] The project of founding the University of Virginia was led by Thomas Jefferson and a host of other large slaveholders, including Joseph Carrington Cabell, John Hartwell Cocke, James Madison, and James Monroe. Together, they owned several hundred people and profited from their labor and their lives, much as generations of UVA students and thousands of other Virginians would for nearly fifty years after Jefferson’s ten enslaved “hands set to work” marking off the future university in 1817.
Over the course of the next decade, the University of Virginia arose out of an abandoned farm field about two miles west of the hamlet of Charlottesville and grew afterward for over four decades. The records did not record the names of the ten enslaved people who came to the university construction site in July 1817, but their presence on that day inaugurated nearly a decade in which enslaved people represented the single largest group of people at the school. A few months later, The Board of Visitors led by Jefferson as Rector authorized the Proctor “to hire laborers for leveling the grounds and performing necessary services for the works or other purposes.”[4] By 1818, there were likely dozens of enslaved people clearing land, leveling the terraces on the Lawn, digging foundations, and making bricks. All were either brought to the construction site by white contractors or rented by the university from a rural hinterland stretching upwards of seventy miles from the school. Writing to Board of Visitors member John Hartwell Cocke in February 1823, UVA contractor John Neilson captured the demographics of the labor force: “our workmen are nearly all African.”[5]
In all likelihood, most of the enslaved people laboring at UVA during nearly ten years of construction were separated from friends and family and had marched long distances to the worksite. In helping to build the university, they endured both difficult working and living conditions and also separation from friends and family. In April 1818, Gilbert, an enslaved man “employed” by white contractor Crenshaw White, fled the university. It is unclear whether he was attempting to head North to freedom, to escape harsh working conditions, or to reunite with loved ones. UVA, already having hired a salaried overseer to surveil and control the growing enslaved workforce, sent him to capture and return Gilbert.[6] Surely, that combination of difficult working conditions, poor treatment, and often long-term separation from family made it more likely that Gilbert and others would try to escape the construction site. In 1822, an enslaved man named Willis ran away from UVA and returned to his family in Louisa County before university overseer James Harrison tracked him down and brought him back.[7] That same year, Fleming also attempted to run away, but was captured by an Albemarle County resident only a mile from the school.[8] Two years later, an enslaved man named Tom similarly escaped UVA and ran home to Louisa County. Overseer James Brockman was sent out by the university to track him down. Tom was eventually captured as a runaway by Francis Houchins in Louisa County, who took him to William Waddy, a Justice of the Peace. Waddy jailed Tom there for sixteen days before Brockman arrived and brought him back.[9]
Many of the elite white supporters of the Virginia public university project, in addition to that participation in human bondage, were beginning to imagine slavery and white rule over enslaved black people as a positive good—something supported by science, politics, and religion. Others, particularly those who came of age in the era of the American Revolution, viewed slavery as a necessary evil that protected white propertied interests and white life from an imagined barbaric race war that would likely ignite if slavery were to end without an immediate removal of people of color from the United States. Thomas Jefferson fit into that latter category and claimed slavery an “unremitting despotism” and that “man must be a prodigy who can retain manners & morals, undepraved by circumstances.” In his 1784 Notes on the State of Virginia, he toyed with the possibility of putting slavery on a path to eventual extinction through a gradual emancipation plan: “It will probably be asked, why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state?... Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks of injuries they have sustained...the real distinctions which nature has made will divide us into parties & produce convulsions which will probably never end but in extermination of one or the other race.” For Jefferson, slavery was evil, but African Americans were incapable of the full fruits of freedom. To end slavery would be to invite race war. As he said, “This unfortunate difference of colour, & perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”[10] In the end, Jefferson remained comfortable imagining slavery as a necessary evil while continuing to rely on the labor of the enslaved.
Jefferson had quite a bit to say about what he saw as black inferiority: the “first difference which strikes us is that of colour...the difference is fixed in nature & is real...& is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?” As he continued, he even compared a supposed desire of great apes to mate with black women to African Americans’ mythical desire to mate with whites, terming the problem an inter-species one. He further argued that blacks “secrete less by the kidnies, & more by glands of the skin...Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus.” For Jefferson, this “difference of race” was one that almost always favored whites and one that was rooted in a form of speciation: “Blacks are in reason much inferior...& in imagination they are dull, tasteless, & anomalous...never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.”[11]
Thus, Jefferson articulated a white supremacist understanding of racial difference and racial hierarchy. That view was widely held by Jefferson’s white Virginian contemporaries and those who lived and learned at UVA from 1825-1865, whether the agreed with him that slavery was a necessary evil or instead understood it as something inherently good. Fellow Board of Visitors member and former U.S. President James Madison, like Jefferson, saw slavery as a necessary evil. By 1836, Madison argued that African Americans were not capable of enjoying the full fruits of American freedom: “It is most obvious, they [enslaved people] themselves are infinitely worsted by the exchange from slavery to liberty—if, indeed, their condition deserves that name.”[12] UVA alumnus Muscoe R.H. Garnett in 1850 declared that “African slavery is the fruitful source of moral & political, social & economical blessings.” He told UVA’s graduating class that year that “Mr. Jefferson saw this danger [of Northern abolitionist quest to limit slavery’s growth and put it on a path to extinction] and designed the University to avert it.”[13] Garnett’s understanding of Jefferson’s “designs” was not out of line with what Jefferson himself had said decades earlier. In February 1821, Jefferson wrote to Board of Visitors member James Breckenridge, opining that northern antislavery agitation, “if not arrested at once would be beyond remedy.” Jefferson worried that if Virginians continued to send their children to northern schools that were “against us in position and principle,” they would learn “opinions and principles in discord with those of their own country.”[14]
Well before 1852, when UVA professor George F. Holmes attacked Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and abolitionist rhetoric as “striking at...the foundations of law, order and government” for ignoring the superior property rights of slave owners, white supremacist and pro-slavery thought often permeated even the classroom at the school. 1839 alumnus James P. Holcombe, holding a law professorship in the 1850s, argued that only white men were entitled to freedom and asserted holding African Americans in bondage enhanced the freedom of white Virginians.[15] In 1857, Mathematics professor Alfred T. Bledsoe, elaborating his own political theory, stated “the institution of slavery, as it exists among us at the South, is founded in political justice, is in accordance with the will of God and the designs of his providence, and is conducive to the highest, purest, best interests of mankind."[16] Edward Alfred Pollard, an 1850 alumnus, wrote an entire epistolary book in which he corresponded with an imagined northern abolitionist. Pollard insistently asked “How much better is the lot of the sable son of Ham, as a slave on a Southern plantation, well cared for, and even religiously educated, than his condition in Africa, where is at the mercy of both men and beasts, in danger of being eaten up bodily by his enemy, or of being sacrificed to the Fetish.” Pollard avidly supported a reopening of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans as a way to buttress the South’s white supremacist order.[17]
It should not be surprising that the educational environment at UVA, suffused daily with lessons in white supremacy and pro-slavery ideology, would have a profound impact on both students and the enslaved. Take, for example, student Noble Beveridge Noland. In 1856, he encountered a ten-year-old enslaved girl passing through the university on an errand. The girl lived at a nearby boarding house, the property of Mrs. Lucy Terrell. We may never know exactly what transpired at that moment, but Noland, confident in his authority as a white male master of people, thought the girl had transgressed the dictates of the racial hierarchy in that brief conversation. Hours later, he went to Terrell’s boarding house, knocked on the door, dragged the girl out of the house and beat her so savagely she was “for a time insensible” and required “attendance of a Physician afterwards.” After Mrs. Terrell complained, the faculty called Noland in. He defended his actions, explaining “Whenever a servant is insolent I will take upon myself the right of punishing him without the consent of his master...When done on the spot and under the spur of provocation,” corporally punishing another person’s property “is not only tolerated by society, but with proper qualifications may be defended on the ground of the necessity of maintaining due subordination of this class of persons [enslaved African Americans].”[18] Unsurprisingly, Noland was not punished.
Ruminations by generations of UVA students about the supposedly kindly treatment of the enslaved by the white master class to the contrary, the enslaved themselves routinely spoke directly to that lie as they resisted the violence and debasement inherent in their enslavement. Some ran from abuse, seeking escape to free territory or desperately trying to reconstitute families. Others resisted in quieter but equally powerful ways, learning to read and write, protecting family and hoping for an end to human bondage. As Isabella Gibbons, enslaved at UVA in the 1850s and 1860s, reminded everyone after the Civil War, “Can we forget the crack of the whip, cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the hand-cuffs, the spaniels [bloodhounds], the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by those horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, nor ever will.”[19]
At UVA in August 1818, an enslaved man named Caesar, who had been rented to the university for one month, finished his month’s work. His owner, George P. Digges, wrote to the Proctor demanding “you will please give directions for him to return home” and asking to be paid twelve dollars for the hire.[20] University records do not indicate what kind of work Caesar had performed, but he likely cleared land or moved earth in terracing the building site. The construction site labor force, although overwhelmingly adult and male, sometimes included women and children. In December 1818, UVA agreed to pay Pallison Boxley—who lived over fifty miles from the school—nearly seven hundred dollars for the rental of “four negro men two boys and a woman” for the ensuing year.[21] That particular contract specified that the university would provide all of them with winter clothes. However, in early March 1821, their work completed, the contract expired, yet still working at UVA, the university sent them away after forcing them to return those winter clothes. All seven enslaved people likely marched back to eastern Louisa County, a distance of over fifty miles, without seasonally appropriate clothing.
Enslaved men Willis and Warner were rented to the university in 1818 and surely spent long days digging and hauling soil. Earlier that year, their owner, Mary Dangerfield, had died. Her estate administrators wrote to the Proctor asking to have Willis and Warner return for the division of her dower property. Thus, Willis and Warner, in all likelihood having walked to UVA from Louisa County at the beginning of the year, had to return to Louisa temporarily for the property division that included them as property, and then walk back once more to labor at the construction site for the remainder of the year. UVA paid Mary Dangerfield’s estate one hundred dollars for the rental of Willis that year.[22] In 1819, John Dangerfield would continue to rent Warner to the university along with Jack, Tom and Billy.[23] Many of the enslaved people rented to the school at that time—referred to simply as “hands” in the Proctor’s records—remained “engaged in leveling the ground.”[24]
Two men named Sam, appearing in UVA records as Sam, Sam the carpenter, Old Sam, or Sam the blacksmith, both began work at the Academical Village in the first few years of construction. One Sam, the blacksmith, was rented to the University by Samuel Carey of Richmond, the capital of Virginia some seventy miles southeast of Charlottesville. Sam, the enslaved blacksmith, first came to the university in 1820, when Carey leased him to the school for a year for two hundred twenty dollars. That year, Sam labored in the blacksmith’s shop hauling coal, burning coal, and shaping iron. Sam was even paid directly for overwork hauling additional coal outside of his regular long working hours.[25] After what must have been an arduous year of long hours and hard work, Sam, along with the other enslaved people leased by the university, was allowed to return home at Christmas. What transpired next speaks clearly to the hardships enslaved people endured when rented far from their homes for long periods of time. The University ordered Sam to carry a note back to Richmond to deliver to his owner, Samuel Carey. On the first of January 1821, Carey wrote to the proctor, indicating that Sam had lost the note and “deem[ed] it proper to advise you (not knowing the purport of your note) that I was disinclined to hire him to work at the University this year [1821] he having a wife here & is very unwilling to be hired so far off."[26] Ultimately, Carey chose to ignore Sam’s pleas to remain in Richmond with his wife and instead leased him to UVA again in 1821.[27]
The other Sam, known as Sam the carpenter and later Old Sam, began work at UVA in 1818, when Proctor Arthur S. Brockenbrough leased him to the school. Sam spent several years at the construction site. From September 1821 to January 1822, Sam tinned the roofs on several buildings in the Academical Village. Sam was clearly a skilled carpenter and tinner, as he was repeatedly assigned complicated tasks and regularly earned pay for overwork. Over the Christmas holiday in late 1821, Sam was paid directly for overwork tinning the Hotel B roof.[28] Brockenbrough, as Proctor, would pay himself twenty dollars a month for Sam’s tinwork, while Sam would earn only two dollars for at least a week’s overwork on Hotel B. In February 1822, Sam was sent to the blacksmith’s shop to lead a team of three enslaved men in carpentry work on the building. There, Sam managed a carpentry project that included enslaved men Dick and Ned.[29]
Sam spent much of 1822 leading carpentry projects in the Academical Village. In September, he did sixty-six dollars of work on Hotel A and also worked on the West Range dormitories, Hotel C, nearly every Lawn dormitory, and also Pavilions V, VII, and VIII.[30] In November, Sam continued to range over the Academical Village construction project, doing carpentry and tinning at several locations, including “putting on tin cover to level cornice & putting down gutters” on Hotel C.[31] His skills were clearly in demand at separate building locations. Proctor Arthur S. Brockenbrough decided that instead of simply renting Sam to the university on a yearly basis as with nearly all other slave hiring arrangements, he would rent Sam to building contractors on an assignment by assignment basis.[32] In December 1822, Sam was once again rented out for nine months on a specific carpentry project. Sam’s work would earn Brockenbrough nineteen dollars a month. It appears that this nine-month project may have also been one in which Sam led a team of enslaved carpenters, this time including Davey, William, and Young Sam (who was almost certainly Sam the carpenter’s son).[33] All four carpenters’ rental agreements included board for those nine months. After October 1823, they still appeared to be working on a building project, but board was no longer included. They may well have begun living in the buildings they were constructing. They were likely the first occupants of one or more Pavilions and dormitory rooms in the Academical Village.[34]
As the university moved toward completion in 1824, 1825, and 1826, Sam the carpenter, his son, Davey, and William, continued to move from one construction project to another. In that year, the university paid only ten or eleven dollars a month for their skilled work, but their hands and handiwork were all over the Academical Village.[35] Although the records do not shed much light on living conditions, one can imagine that they were less than ideal for Sam’s team of carpenters or any other enslaved people at the construction site. In 1827, Sam was still laboring at UVA and the Proctor’s records include a note: “Capt Brockenbrough will have the goodness to give Sam an order for a pare of shoes.”[36] Sam, Young Sam, Davey, and William effectively built much of the core of the Academical Village, and as the first residents of one or more Pavilions and dormitory rooms, slept on floors or pallets in the unfurnished and often incomplete structures.
Other enslaved people, too, were instrumental to the construction project. Their work demands a re-thinking of the history of UVA spaces. For instance, in 1821 and 1822, as the Hotel A and D sites became active construction zones, an enslaved man named Zachariah was charged with digging the foundations. Zachariah, shovel in hand, spent his days removing the clay soil from each site. Since both buildings included fully finished basement working kitchen and living space, these were both deep digs.[37] The Proctor and university contractors were on a tight schedule and wanted both foundations dug quickly, so Zachariah was paid directly for overwork in evenings and on Sundays. By August 1821, Zachariah had been paid over ten dollars for that extra labor.[38]
The work, though surely exhausting, went well until Zachariah had cleared the first few feet of clay and hit bedrock. At that point, Zachariah’s effort alone would not be enough to smash through the rock, complete digging out each cellar, and meet construction deadlines. The records indicate that other enslaved men were assigned to join Zachariah and remove the bedrock, as the August 1821 records indicate that Zachariah only dug out a “portion” of the cellar. Even with the additional help, Zachariah and the digging team did not complete the project until fall 1821. Although Zachariah was paid directly for that evening and Sunday overwork at the dig, Zachariah remained an enslaved man rented to the university, so the university paid a business, “Wolfe and Raphael,” for the vast majority of his work. Wolfe and Raphael had rented Zachariah to the university.[39] Zachariah spent close to two years leading the cellar projects at Hotels A and D. In November 1822, he was still digging the foundation holes and working close to round the clock to finish the work. In that month, the university paid him fifteen dollars for overwork.[40] Although Zachariah’s efforts were only recorded in financial transactions, his work was pivotal to the creation of not one, but two dining halls at the school. He may have continued to work at the university for years afterward. In 1828, even though the construction project was essentially complete and UVA had been open for three years, the university purchased new shoes for Zachariah and four other enslaved “labourers” still rented by the school. That same year, the university also paid free black seamstress Keziah Davis seventy-five cents for making two shirts and a pair of trousers for him.[41]
As the initial construction phase at the University of Virginia came to an end after the school opened in 1825, there was a shift in slaveholding and the demography of the enslaved community. As contractors completed their building assignments, they left the area and took enslaved laborers with them. Likewise, the university, which had been renting dozens of human beings on both short-term and annual leases, rented fewer and fewer people as construction came to an end in 1826 and 1827. Simultaneously, after fall 1825 when faculty moved into Pavilions and outsourced hotel contractors occupied the Hotel dining rooms to feed students and manage their rooms, slaveholding shifted from a male-dominated institutionally-leased enslaved population to one where eight or more professors and three or four hotel keepers became the primary slaveholders. Institutionally, the university continued to rent five to ten people annually and periodically others on a short-term basis as projects arose.
The enslaved community at the university by 1827 was changing demographically, with far more women and children in the population than during construction. As professors moved with their families into the Pavilions, each Pavilion became home to anywhere from one to twelve enslaved people, with an average of three to seven enslaved people living in each home. The three or four hotels continuously in operation became sites of concentrated enslavement, with anywhere from ten to twenty-five enslaved people living and working in the vicinity of each hotel. In those locations, too, the enslaved population after 1825 shifted towards more women and children. That pattern would remain relatively constant through 1865. By 1830, forty-five of the one hundred forty-three enslaved people living in the Academical Village were under ten years of age—thirty one percent of the enslaved community were children. Even the small population of free people of color living within the university’s precincts in that year were also young, with half aged nine or younger. Ten years later, twenty-seven percent of one hundred and forty-three enslaved people were under age ten. In 1850, the percentage of young children in the enslaved population at UVA continued to hover at just under thirty percent. Fully thirty-seven percent of the enslaved population in 1850 were age 15 or younger. This demographic change was significant, for “enslaved children had virtually no childhood because they entered the workplace early and were subjected to arbitrary authority, punishment, and separation, just as enslaved adults were.”[42] With so many young white male students indoctrinated to the privileges of mastery and figuratively bathing in pro-slavery ideology, the young and female in particular routinely experienced arbitrary authority and violence anywhere, everywhere, and at any time. Noble Noland’s 1856 violent assault on a ten-year-old girl was just one such example. For instance, in 1850, three students committed “a violent outrage (a rape).” They had been found in a field west of the University gang-raping a “small negro girl, a slave about 12 years old.”[43]
Adult women, making up only a tiny portion of the enslaved community during construction, after 1827 came to represent a significant portion of the enslaved population. In 1830, women represented forty-four percent of the enslaved, a significant increase from just a few years earlier when young adult men made up the bulk of the enslaved labor force during construction. Ten years later, women represented just over half of the enslaved community, with seventy-two women ranging in age from well under ten to fifty-six years old living at the school. By 1850, women made up fifty-four percent of the enslaved population and were often over-represented at the Hotels. In that year, Hotelkeeper James E. Watson rented or owned eighteen enslaved people, eleven of whom were women ranging in age from one to sixty. Thus, enslaved women, like children, remained exposed to violence at the hands of white male students in particular. For example, several enslaved women owned by the Assistant Proctor, gathering water at a pump one night, found themselves subjected to “rudeness and indecency” by a group of students.[44] On another typical night, several students returned from drinking in town and, as they were passing professor Gessner Harrison’s pavilion on the way back to their dorms, attempted to force themselves upon an enslaved woman living in one of Harrison’s cellar rooms. Harrison awoke to the loud “knocking at [a] cellar door & heard indecent propositions made to a female servant.”[45]
Those experiences—focusing on enslaved people living, learning, and laboring—shed a new light on how we understand the landscape of the university. What had been “Professor Harrison’s Pavilion” in 1829 can now be understood as housing a cellar room where an enslaved woman lived and containing a poorly-ventilated basement kitchen where she likely worked preparing food for Harrison’s family. Another enslaved person, Lewis Commodore, who was purchased outright by the university in 1832 after being rented to the school for years, worked for years at UVA as an attendant to the Rotunda’s science classrooms. It’s highly probable that he lived in a small room in the Rotunda for some time, too. Even 1850 alumnus Edward Alfred Pollard, so keen on buttressing that white supremacist order and intent on naturalizing enslavement as something inherently positive, could only peddle in derisive black caricature for so long before inadvertently revealing something recognizing Lewis Commodore’s humanity and intelligence. Pollard remembered him as “most remarkable for the stories of learning he had amassed in his long familiarity with college life...he had acquired a smart, practical knowledge of chemistry. He was also something of a classical scholar.”[46] Commodore, although forced to wear the public mask of deference and perform servility whenever in the presence of white students or faculty, had learned quite a bit about chemistry in his years maintaining the chemistry classroom and chemical hearth. The Rotunda, in this view, is where Lewis Commodore learned chemistry and became a skilled manager of a complicated chemical hearth.[47]
Lewis Commodore continued to toil at UVA even in 1850-51, when UVA students, agitated over the prospects of slavery’s westward expansion being limited by Congress, were calling for secession to protect that “southern rights” in slavery. In January 1851, UVA students feverishly wondered whether “will the North stop here? We can not believe that she will. The war which is now being waged against the rights and honor of the South, will never terminate until slavery is finally banished from these shores. The insatiable spirit of Abolitionism which seems to possess our Northern allies, can never be appeased by any sacrifice short of this.”[48] At that moment in 1850, students incubating in the pro-slavery spirit of the school, were already calling for slave states to leave the United States in a quest to protect and expand their slave power. At that same moment, however, Lewis Commodore, resisted that pro-slavery spirit and heard in the fevered anti-abolitionist conversations of students a reason to hope for change. Edward A. Pollard remembered that Commodore “was particularly pleased in pumping Yankee students of all they could tell him of free country. The condition of his black brethren in the North was an object of great solicitude to him.” Lewis Commodore’s life, then, becomes a pointed rejection of the white supremacist ideas that pervaded the school. [49]
James Monroe, born enslaved in Amherst County, similarly labored quietly at UVA, all the while imagining a life in freedom with his wife and children. He arrived at UVA in 1830 and worked in Hotel F there run by John N. Rose until Rose left the university four years later and opened a boarding house nearby. In 1839, John Rose’s wife Mary willed James Monroe to their daughter Maria, who would move to Memphis, Tennessee, a few years later with her new husband, Erasmus Rose. At some point after the transfer, Monroe worked out a self-purchase arrangement with Maria Rose and her husband before he was rented out to Maria’s father in Charlottesville. The money for his yearly contract would go to his absentee owners, but Monroe, if he could earn money on the side, was offered the opportunity to buy his own freedom. He worked as a hotel attendant and dormitory servant for years, cleaning student rooms, running errands for students, and doing dining service at Rose’s boarding house and on Grounds. He also worked separately for professors—including Law Professor John B. Minor in Pavilion X—and attended hotel rooms in Charlottesville. By 1844, John Rose had also joined his children in Memphis, but Monroe remained in Virginia, continuing to work to pay for his own freedom.[50]
In 1847, Monroe successfully purchased his own freedom for several hundred dollars while continuing to work for professors and in hotels and boarding houses near Charlottesville and the university. By that time, he had a wife still held in bondage and several children, and continued to work tirelessly to free them. By the early 1850s, he had managed to purchase his wife and four of his six children. After decades of ceaseless toil, Monroe left Virginia at some point between 1853 and 1856, taking his wife and the four children he had successfully freed with him. In 1856, now living in Cincinnati, he continued to work to purchase and free his remaining two children. In that year, he wrote a letter to UVA Law professor John B. Minor, who Monroe had worked for in Pavilion X for years. He asked Minor for help in arranging the purchase of his daughter Roseia. Monroe had already amassed eight hundred dollars and simply needed help organizing the sale. Writing the letter to Minor in itself represented a powerful rebuttal to the pro-slavery ideology tha permeated Albemarle County and professor Minor’s classroom at the time. Monroe, though enslaved, had learned to read and write and fought his way to freedom. Monroe’s letter, though, also speaks clearly to just how hard and frustratingly incomplete that process had been. He told Minor “I am getting very old now. And hardley able to take care of myself. And I would veary mutch like to have my daughter with me. I griefe after her so much.”[51] It is unclear what, if anything, Minor may have done to assist Monroe. In 1860, Monroe was still living in Cincinnati, but Roseia did not live with him, so he may have been unsuccessful in freeing Roseia. Thus, the Academical Village represents the site where James Monroe’s quest, despite being denied the full fruits of freedom, to emancipate both himself and his family began.
William Gibbons, born into slavery in Albemarle County as the University of Virginia was opening to its first sessions, similarly lived a life in rejection of racist ideas about black inferiority and refused to be restricted by the laws and customs of pro-slavery Virginia. By the 1850s, Gibbons had been purchased by UVA professor William McGuffey. Gibbons lived and worked as a butler in McGuffey’s Pavilion. While at UVA, he would follow the example of men like Lewis Commodore in quietly working to carve out space for family and independent life while also seeking learning wherever he could find it. William would also meet and marry enslaved woman Isabella, who was owned by another UVA professor. Although their marriage was not recognized by law in Virginia, they began to raise a family in slavery while hoping for a free future. One of their children, Bella (who had also been enslaved at UVA), remembered that her father had educated himself by reading books in professor McGuffey’s pavilion and paying close attention to student conversations.[52] Thus, the Pavilions and classrooms as spaces designed for white learning, as well as kitchens and basements as sites of African American life and labor, were all significantly spaces of black learning and yearning for a better future.
Multiple generations of students, faculty, and staff at the University of Virginia understood slavery and white rule over enslaved black people as something supported by science, politics, and religion. Enslaved African Americans at the school, however, belied that ideology on a daily basis—resisting the terms of their enslavement, creating families and cultivating community, learning to read and write, and planning for a life free from white surveillance and domination. Their successes in that odyssey are visible if one takes the time to look closely. William Gibbons in 1863—two years before the inauguration of a process of general emancipation even began—would become the first African American minister in an emerging independent black Baptist church as the black community demanded a church free from the white enslaver. He would go on to Howard University to earn a divinity degree and then help found a Baptist church in Washington, D.C. His wife Isabella would seek education as a teacher through the New England Freedman’s Aid Society and become the first teacher of color in the Charlottesville freedman’s school. James Monroe would return to Albemarle County after the Civil War, still desperately trying to reconstitute his family separated by human bondage.
All of them, whether Sam the carpenter, Zachariah, Isabella Gibbons, Gilbert, Willis, Ceasar, Lewis Commodore, or the hundreds of other enslaved men, women, and children whose life stories were poorly documented and may be unrecoverable today, contributed mightily to the construction and maintenance of the University of Virginia for a half century, despite often struggling in difficult living conditions and enduring violence and abuse. The spaces of the Academical Village, when considered from their perspective, tell a very different story about life and learning at UVA and serve as powerful refutations of the ideas about black incapacity and inferiority advanced by Thomas Jefferson and further developed by the pro-slavery ideologues who taught and learned at the school in the forty years after Jefferson’s death in 1826.
NOTES—
[1] Thomas Jefferson, “notes on the Siting of Central College,” July 18, 1817, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series: Vol. 11, 19 Jan. to 31 Aug. 1817 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 544; Edmund Bacon, “Jefferson at Monticello: The Private Life of Thomas Jefferson,” in Jefferson at Monticello: Recollections of a Monticello Slave and of a Monticello Overseer. James A. Bear, Jr., ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1967), 32-33.
[2] 1820 and 1860 U.S. Federal Census state-level Data from Steven Manson, Jonathan Schroeder, David Van Riper, and Steven Ruggles. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 13.0 [Database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2018. http://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V13.0. In 1820, 425,153 enslaved people lived in Virginia. They represented 27.6% of entire U.S. enslaved population; in 1860, the population had grown to 490,865, representing 12.4% of entire U.S. enslaved population.
[3] 1820 and 1860 U.S. Federal Census county-level Data from Steven Manson, Jonathan Schroeder, David Van Riper, and Steven Ruggles. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 13.0 [Database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2018. http://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V13.0
[4] Minutes of the Rector and Board of Visitors, RG-1/1/3. October 7, 1817.
[5] John Neilson to John Hartwell Cocke, February 22, 1823. In Papers of John Hartwell Cocke, 1725–1939, University of Virginia Library.
[6] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 1, Folder 6.
[7] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, July 22, 1822, p. 138 and Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 17, Labor Account 1819-1823.
[8] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 17, Labor Account 1819-1823; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, April 5, 1822, p. 72; Papers of the Proctors Office, University of Virginia 1821-1938, RG-5/3. Miscellaneous Papers. Receipts and Vouchers, April 1822; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, May 3, 1822, p. 125; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 2: 1819-1825, p. 224; and Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, May 8, 1822, p. 126.
[9] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 4, Folder 425; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, August 23, 1824, p. 320; Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 18, Accounts February - June 1823; and Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, September 16, 1824, p. 328.
[10] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, 1784. http://web.archive.org/web/20110221131356/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefVirg.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div1
[11] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, 1784. https://web.archive.org/web/20110221131356/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefVirg.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div1
[12] James Madison to the Editor of the Farmers’ Register, 22 March 1836, Founders Online Archive, https://founders.archives.gov.
[13] Muscoe R.H. Garnett, An Address Delivered Before the Society of Alumni of the University of Virginia, At Its Annual Meeting, Held in the Rotunda on the 29th of June, 1850 (Charlottesville, Va: 1850): 27.
[14] Thomas Jefferson to James Breckenridge, February 15, 1821. http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-04-02-02-1839
[15] George Frederick Holmes, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Southern Literary Messenger 18 (1852): 721; James P. Holcombe, An Address Before the Society of Alumni, of the University of Virginia, at its Annual Meeting (Charlottesville: MacFarlane & Fergusson, 1853); James P. Holcombe, Sketches of the Political Issues and Controversies of the Revolution: A Discourse Delivered Before the Virginia Historical Society, at Their Ninth Annual Meeting, January 17, 1856 (Richmond: The Society, 1856); James P. Holcombe, “Is Slavery Consistent with Natural Law?,” Southern Literary Messenger 27 (1858): 401-421.
[16] Alfred T. Bledsoe, Liberty and Slavery, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1857): 8.
[17] Edward Alfred Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1859): 45.
[18] Minutes of the Faculty of the University of Virginia, May 2 and 3, 1856.
[19] Isabella Gibbons letter, March 29, 1867, The Freedmen’s Record (V. 3, No. 6, June 1867).
[20] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 1, Folder 6.
[21] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 1, Folder 6.
[22] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 1, Folder 3; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, September 26, 1818, p3; Report and Documents Respecting the University of Virginia, p28. Richmond: Thomas Ritchie, 1819.
[23] Report and Documents Respecting the University of Virginia, p30. Richmond: Thomas Ritchie, 1819.
[24] Miscellaneous Memoranda, David Watson. March 18, 1819.
[25] Proctors Ledgers - Nov 1818; Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 17, Accounts January - June 1821; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, June, 1820, p. 26; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 1: 1817-1822, p. 34; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, June 26, 1820, p. 25; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 2: 1819-1825, p. 16; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 1: 1817-1822, p. 39; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, December 23, 1820, p. 42; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, December 23, 1820, p. 52; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, December 23, 1820, p. 42;
[26] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 2, Folder 118. Samuel Cary to Arthur S. Brockenbrough, January 1, 1821.
[27] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, April 13, 1821, p. 46, and Vol 2: 1819-1828, April 20, 1821, p. 69; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 2: 1819-1825, p. 34; Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 17, Accounts January - June 1821; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, May 17, 1821, p. 49; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 1: 1817-1822, p. 62; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, May 21, 1821, p. 77;
[28] Proctor’s Daybook, 1821-1828, January 9, September 25 (1822), September 16 (1823), November 27 (1824), December 30 (1825), April 27 (1826), January 3 (1827); Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, April 5, 1822, p. 124; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 2: 1819-1825, p. 223.
[29] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, January 30, 1822, p. 113; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, Febuary 23, 1822, p. 69 and Vol 2: 1819-1828, February 23, 1822, p. 117; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 2: 1819-1825, p. 219.
[30] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, September 25, 1822, p. 143;
[31] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, November 25, 1822, p. 159 and 160; Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 17, Labor Account 1819-1823.
[32] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 17, Labor Account 1819-1823; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, November 25, 1822, p. 166.
[33] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, September 16, 1823, p. 254.
[34] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, December 29, 1823, p. 281 and 282.
[35] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, June 28, 1824, p. 309 and July 5, 1824, p. 310; September 20, 1824, p. 330; November 24, 1824, p. 339; December 31, 1824, p. 343; and September 1, 1825, p. 380. See also Arthur S. Brockenbrough University of Virginia Account in Smith's Shop, 1825. Papers of the Proctor of the University of Virginia, RG-5/3/1.111. Box 5, Folder 539 and Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1820-1827. December 30, 1825, p. 408; and April 27, 1826, p. 420; and Proctor’s Daybook, 1821-1828, December 30 (1825), April 27 (1826), January 3 (1827).
[36] Papers of the Proctor of the University of Virginia, RG-5/3/1.111. Box 19, Bills & Accounts July - December 1827.
[37] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, July 19, 1821, p. 53 and 66; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 1: 1817-1822, p. 98 and 203.
[38] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 17, Accounts July - December 1821.
[39] Papers of the Proctors of the University of Virginia, 1817 - 1828. RG-5/3/1.111. Box 17, Accounts July - December 1821; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 1: 1817-1822, October 1, 1821, p. 58; Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, October 13, 1821, p. 101; Ledgers Maintained by the Proctor of the University of Virginia, 1817-1910. Vol. 2: 1819-1825, p. 209.
[40] Journals of Business Transactions of Central College, Vol 2: 1819-1828, November 25, 1822, p. 159.
[41] Papers of the Proctor of the University of Virginia, RG-5/3/1.111. Box 19, Bills & Accounts May - July 1828; Papers of the Proctor of the University of Virginia, RG-5/3/1.111. Box 7, Folder 881. Receipt, September 12, 1828.
[42] Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth Century America. 2nd edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011, p. xxi-xxii.
[43] Minutes of the Faculty of the University of Virginia, April 24, 1850, p. 80; Minutes of the Rector and Board of Visitors of the University, June 28, 1850, p. 168.
[44] Journals of the Chairman of the Faculty, February 1, 1830, p. 211.
[45] Journals of the Chairman of the Faculty, June 25, 1829.
[46] Edward Alfred Pollard, “A Re-Gathering of ‘Black Diamonds’ in the Old Dominion,” Southern Literary Messenger, New Series, Vol. VIII (October 1859), p. 295.
[47] See Edward A. Pollard, “A Re-Gathering of ‘Black Diamonds’ in the Old Dominion,” Southern Literary Messenger, New Series, Vol. VII (October 1859), p. 295, where Pollard describes Lewis Commodore as “Big Lewis...the old negro Janitor and factotum...a mild negro, of a greasy and overfed apperance.”
[48]Address of the Southern Rights' Association of the University of Virginia to the Young Men of the South. Charlottesville, Va.: James Alexander, Printer. 1851: p. 6.
[49] Edward Alfred Pollard, “A Re-Gathering of ‘Black Diamonds’ in the Old Dominion,” Southern Literary Messenger, New Series, Vol. VIII (October 1859), p. 295.
[50] Kirt von Daacke, Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012: 84-94; See also Benjamin Ford, “Edmond and James Monroe Biography 10.21.14,” unpublished paper, which documents more fully the white Rose family and Monroe’s time at UVA.
[51] James Monroe letter to John B. Minor, August 30, 1856, in Papers of the Minor and Wilson Family 1764-1936, Box 8, Correspondence 1856 June-Nov., University of Virginia Library.
[52] Gayle Schulman, “Slaves at the University of Virginia,” unpublished paper presented to the African American Genealogy Group of Charlottesville/Albemarle, May 2003, p. 63-64; The Freedman’s Record, Vol. 4, No. 3 (March 1868), p. 41-42; Scott Nesbit, “The Education of William Gibbons,” 2004 William R. Kenan, Jr. Endowment Fund of the Academical Village Fellowship paper, Center for Undergraduate Excellence, University of Virginia, p. 19. https://www.virginia.edu/president/kenanscholarship/work/archive_files/scott_nesbit.pdf.
Copyright © 2018 Kirt von Daacke
