Yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit two places I’d always wanted to see - the homes of both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
Both are the mansions of their day, and reflect the men who lived in them, their lifestyle and the age in which they were born and lived. They are monuments to freedom, but they are also reminders of power and privilege.
While Madison is billed, with his wife, Dolly, as the most powerful couple of their day, Jefferson was, going by the size and elaborateness of his estate, the wealthier man. He also spent half of his adult life serving his country, mostly away from his property. Madison was a small man, unhealthy and sickly, so he didn’t travel well. He never left the US and spent as much time as his service to the US allowed at his home, Montpelier.
George Washington also spent a lot of time away form home, and begrudged every minute, according to his many friends and associates, attested to in his many letters noting that unhappiness. But he had much the larger estate and a much more self-sufficient one than the other two, apparently. Plus, it was closer to Washington.
What did these three men have in common, apart from their obvious fame as Founders of this great country?
Money, inherited social station and the power that came with it, and land. All three were powerful and wealthy landowners, influential in their local colonies and throughout the thirteen as time went on. This was, as it turns out, a powerful reason why the colonies got into strife with England. The various actions England took hurt the pocketbooks of the more powerful and wealthy of the movers and shakers in the thirteen colonies, and together, they eventually got together and decided to do something about it. It never hurt that much of England’s activities in this regard hurt a lot of the common folk too, as their support was crucial to the eventual success of the Revolution, but I’d wager that if folks like Jefferson and Washington hadn’t felt that pain too, it might have never gone anywhere.
Why? Plain and simple, power. Jefferson, Washington and Madison represent the elite of the colonies, men who manipulated the strings of power in their local legislatures. Other people listened to them, because they were the landed aristocracy.
Don’t forget, this was still a feudal system. All of the land in the colonies was ceded to them by land grants from the King. You didn’t own your property, the King did and you just kind of rented it from him. Of course, there was a complex form of sublease and outright purchase of grants, but in the end, the king was the Big Kahuna. (Remember, it’s
good to be the king!)
Slavery was accepted as a common thing, and a natural part of life. The economy depended in part on this low cost labor, and the elaborate lifestyle of the wealthy was not possible without that forced labor.
Yes, that included the men who, in our Declaration of Independence, declared that all men are, and of right ought to be, free and independent from the oppression of the landed aristocracy of Europe! Jefferson owned, in his lifetime, over 600 slaves. Madison owned around 200, and Washington around the six hundred figure, some his, some his wife’s and some leased from a neighbor.
At least these three, and probably others, expressed misgivings about being beholden to a system which allowed them to enslave others, and only Washington successfully ended up freeing his, albeit after his death. Both Jefferson and Madison’s families had to sell slaves to hold onto the property, and all of them left huge debts which eventually required their estates to be sold to satisfy. But none of them could find it in themselves to sacrifice their own personal lifestyle to apply their high principles to their own circumstances.
The framework of the society they were born into and raised to rule was a feudal one, and brutal in the extreme by modern standards. There was no health insurance, few doctors, almost no hospitals at all, and if you went broke, you were on the streets overnight. Debtor’s prisons were legal and full of the unfortunate. Slaves were fed and cared for at a minimum level, as cheaply as possible, and even free men were paid little for their honest labor.
Materials were expensive, though. Much of the cost of almost anything was due to material cost. Transportation was slow and subject to banditry and piracy, necessitating the additional cost of armed protection at times. Production methods were primitive, meaning slow and difficult in many ways. There was no mass production, everything was produced one at a time, by craftsmen, limiting the numbers which could be produced. Go back to your Economics classes - fewer goods meant higher prices!
These were the conditions existing in the thirteen colonies in the late 1700’s. Life was hard, short and brutal. Disease was often fatal, as medicine was primitive. Political power was wielded by a landed aristocracy which inherited that power and wealth by blood. It was maintained by brute force - dissent was brutally eliminated.
