Capital punishment

In the late summer of 1800 a letter came from Richmond. Governor James Monroe wrote that a carefully planned rising among the slaves had been uncovered before it could begin. The leader was a blacksmith named Gabriel, a slave of Thomas Prosser. He and those who joined him meant to seize the city, take arms, and fight for their freedom. The plot was betrayed. Men were already in custody, and the hangings had started.

Monroe asked me, on the 15th of September, how many more should die. Ten had already been hanged. More trials were coming. I answered him five days later from Monticello. Those who had lived through the immediate danger, I said, would naturally want more blood. Even here, where everything had stayed quiet, there was a strong feeling among the neighbors that there had been hanging enough. The other states and the world at large would forever condemn us if we went beyond what was strictly necessary and turned justice into revenge. They would not lose sight of the rights of both sides, or of what the unsuccessful side had been seeking. Our situation was difficult, for I doubted these people could ever live safely among us again. I suggested locking them up until the legislature could act, or sending them out of the country.

In the end about twenty-six were hanged, Gabriel himself on the 10th of October. But others were spared or sent away. Some of my advice for restraint was followed.

Years later, when the question of sending some of the convicted men to Sierra Leone arose, I wrote that they were not ordinary criminals. They were people guilty of what the safety of society forced us to treat as a crime, but which their own feelings might see in a very different way. They themselves had said as much. One declared he had nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer if the British had captured him, and that he had risked his life to obtain the liberty of his countrymen. They had planned a flag marked “death or liberty.”

Nine years after the rising the case was different. After I left the presidency in March 1809, my papers and belongings were sent by water from Washington toward Monticello. Among them was a heavy trunk of stationery that held the Indian vocabularies I had gathered for thirty years. I had collected about fifty, including ones Captain Lewis brought back from the West, and I had arranged many of them in columns for comparison. The trunk was singled out on the James River because of its weight and the thought that it held something precious. Thieves broke it open. Finding only papers, they threw the whole contents into the river in disappointment. Most of the vocabularies were ruined. A few leaves floated ashore and were pulled from the mud, so stained and damaged that little use could be made of them.

When I learned the culprit had been caught and put on trial, I was pleased. In a letter written a few months after the loss, I said he would no doubt be hanged. Those sheets were the work of decades. They held the last recorded words of tribes that were vanishing. To destroy them was to rob knowledge itself. For the men who rose under Gabriel I had asked for mercy. For the man who destroyed the vocabularies I wanted the rope.