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.Virginia’s shift during the post-Revolutionary period, from growing tobacco to growing wheat, altered normal work patterns on plantations.The new crop required less labor overall than tobacco cultivation, creating longer periods when there was no work to be done in the fields.It was in the direct interest of slave owners to have their slaves gainfully employed instead of waiting idly for work on the farm.So they sent them to Richmond to find work there or be hired by other farmers, as Jefferson had done with Jack.These men, and sometimes women, usually turned all or most of their wages over to their owners.A few others, like the Hemings brothers, kept the money.Whatever their circumstances, the people who remained in town gained valuable information about how to maneuver in the world beyond the plantation.9Their more independent existence emboldened Richmond’s black residents in ways that often discomfited whites.In the same letter in which he groused about Robert Hemings’s plan for emancipation, Jefferson, asking his son-in-law to hire some male slaves for him in the Richmond market for the coming January, stipulated that they be from “the country” and not from Richmond.He did not “chuse,” he wrote, to have men from the city mix “with [his] own negroes.”10 Those Richmond “negroes” would come to Monticello with their city dwellers’ heightened expectations and diverse experiences and wreak havoc in the limited and settled world of rural plantation life.He had had quite enough of that.In the sentences immediately following, Jefferson gave the bitter (to him) proof of the deleterious effects that cities had upon slaves: Robert Hemings, with confidence and contacts developed in Richmond, had wanted to leave him.The town was, in Rhys Isaac’s description, “a fickle, polymorphous segregated, non-segregated…fast-growing” place, where laborers, black and white, shared space with a much smaller number of privileged whites.11 These poor and middling types were making their own rules in ways sometimes troubling to the town’s more prosperous citizens, who preferred it if each social and racial group stayed in its designated place.At the same time, some better-off whites took advantage of the freewheeling attitude, particularly the great frequency of interracial socializing.Blacks and whites who worked together during the day continued their contact in bars and other gatherings at work’s end.James Callender, who in six years would become the scourge of Robert Hemings’s sister Sally, spent time in Richmond at the end of the 1790s and early 1800s and was among the most vocal and expressive critics of its milieu.From his position as a columnist for the Richmond Examiner, the town’s major newspaper, he railed against the “black dances” and barbecues often attended by white men of all strata of society.The rabidly racist Scottish émigré was outraged to see white men sitting in boxes at the local theater with their black girlfriends.As it turned out, his boss, Meriwether Jones, the editor of the Examiner, had a black mistress.When he and Callender fell out over Callender’s exposé of Jefferson’s life with Sally Hemings, Callender dubbed Lewis’s paramour “Mistress Examiner.” Of course, this sort of mixing went on in rural venues as well, but the openness in Richmond violated norms of secrecy-based decorum.It was one thing to carry on these liaisons with black women in the privacy of the home, quite another to appear with them in public.12While the needs of the domestic economy and cultural mores shaped the social and racial climate in Richmond, news from the outside had an impact as well.Two world-defining revolutions—in France and Saint Domingue (Haiti)—put the issues of liberty and slavery into the public discourse in the most profound way—an especially important and difficult conversation in a fledgling country conceived in both liberty and chattel slavery.The two events had different implications for white and black Americans.Fresh from their own break with a monarchical system, most white Americans initially supported the French Revolution.As noted earlier, while James and Robert Hemings were in New York in 1790, those calling for the abolition of slavery, black and white, linked their struggle to the spirit of ’89 in France.After the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793 and the excesses of Robespierre, the mood changed.French émigrés escaping the Terror brought news of France’s spiral out of control, furthering skepticism about the new day dawning in the country of America’s first ally.France and its revolution galvanized politics at the national level for all of the 1790s.Saint Domingue, which came quickly on the heels of the French uprising, was a different story from the start, at least for many whites.The 1791 uprising there, and subsequent battle for control of what had been France’s richest colony, raised the specter of slave revolts in the South [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]