Like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson thought about class in continental terms. His greatest accomplishment as president was the 1803 acquisition of Louisiana, a vast territory that more than doubled the size of the United States. He called the new western domain an “empire for liberty,” by which he meant something other than a free-market economy or a guarantee of social mobility. The Louisiana Territory, as he envisioned it, would encourage agriculture and forestall the growth of manufacturing and urban poverty—that was his formula for liberty. It was not Franklin’s “happy mediocrity” (a compression of classes across an endless stretch of unsettled land), but a nation of farmers large and small. This difference is not nominal: Franklin and Paine used Pennsylvania as their model, while Jefferson saw America’s future—and the contours of its class system—through the prism of Virginia.1
Eighteenth-century Virginia was both an agrarian and a hierarchical society. By 1770, fewer than 10 percent of white Virginians laid claim to over half the land in the colony; a small upper echelon of large planters each owned slaves in the hundreds. More than half of white men owned no land at all, working as tenants or hired laborers, or contracted as servants. Land, slaves, and tobacco remained the major sources of wealth in Jefferson’s world, but the majority of white men did not own slaves. That is why Mr. Jefferson wafted well above the common farmers who dotted the countryside that extended from his celebrated mountaintop home. By the time of the Revolution, he owned at least 187 slaves, and by the Battle of Yorktown he held title to 13,700 acres in six different counties in Virginia.2
Pinning down Jefferson’s views on class is complicated by the seductiveness of his prose. His writing could be powerful, even poetic, while reveling in rhetorical obfuscation. He praised “cultivators of the earth” as the most valuable of citizens; they were the “chosen people of God,” and they “preserved a republic in vigor” through their singularly “useful occupation.” And yet Jefferson’s pastoral paragon of virtue did not describe any actual Virginia farmers, and not even he could live up to this high calling. Despite efforts at improving efficiency on his farms, he failed to turn a profit or rescue himself from mounting debts. In a 1796 letter, he sadly admitted that his farms were in a “barbarous state” and that he was “a monstrous farmer.” Things continued downhill from there.3
Though we associate Jefferson with agrarian democracy and the yeoman class, his style was that of a gentleman farmer. As a member of the upper class, he hired others or used slaves to work his land. He did not become an engaged farmer until 1795, prompted by his growing interest in treating agriculture as a science. He experimented with new techniques taken from his reading, and kept meticulous records in his farm and garden books. He owned the latest manuals on husbandry—there were fifty in Monticello’s library. He could ignore what didn’t spark his curiosity. His dislike of the vile weed of tobacco, which he kept growing for financial reasons, led him to admit in 1801 that he “never saw a leaf of my tobacco packed in my life.” For the most part, agricultural improvement fascinated him, and he did design a new plough, with its moldboard of least resistance, in 1794, hoping in large and small ways to modernize American farming.4
The irony is that Jefferson’s approach to improving American farming was decidedly English, and not American at all. The books he read and the kind of husbandry he admired came primarily from the English agrarian tradition and British improvers of his day. His decision to raise wheat so as not to be completely dependent on tobacco, coupled with his plan to introduce merino sheep into every Virginia county in order to produce better wool, were attempts to correct what his fellow improver George Washington lambasted as the “slovenly” habits in farmers of their state. Virginians were far behind the English in the use of fertilizers, crop rotation, and harvesting and ploughing methods. It was common for large planters and small farmers alike to deplete acres of soil and then leave it fallow and abandoned. “We waste as we please,” was how Jefferson gingerly phrased it.5
Jefferson knew that behind all the rhetoric touting America’s agricultural potential there was a less enlightened reality. For every farsighted gentleman farmer, there were scads of poorly managed plantations and unskilled small (and tenant) farmers struggling to survive. How could slaves, who did most of the fieldwork on Virginia plantations, assume the mantle of “cultivators of the earth”? For Jefferson, it seems, they were mere “tillers.” Tenants, who rented land they did not own, and landless laborers and squatters lacked the commercial acumen and genuine virtue of cultivators too. In his perfect world, lower-class farmers could be improved, just like their land. If they were given a freehold and a basic education, they could adopt better methods of husbandry and pass on favorable habits and traits to their children. As we will see, however, Jefferson’s various reform efforts were thwarted by those of the ruling gentry who had little interest in elevating the Virginia poor. Even more dramatically, his agrarian version of social mobility was immediately compromised by his own profound class biases, of which he was unaware.6
Historically hailed as a democrat, Thomas Jefferson was never able to escape his class background. His privileged upbringing inevitably colored his thinking. He could not have penned the Declaration of Independence or been elected to the Continental Congress if he had not been a prominent member of the Virginia gentry. He had the advantages of an education in the classics, and was trained in law and letters at the elite College of William and Mary. He collected books, amassing 6,487 volumes. Proficient in Latin and Greek, he enjoyed Italian, read old French and some Spanish, and was also versed in the obscure Anglo-Saxon language. He surrounded himself with European luxury goods and was an epicurean in his tastes, as displayed by his love of French sauternes. To imagine that Jefferson had some special insight into the anxious lives of the lower sort, or that he truly appreciated the unpromising conditions tenant farmers experienced, is to fail to account for the wide gulf that separated the rich and poor in Virginia.7