Monticello

1. Monticello • Although slaves in Virginia could not marry legally, the institution of marriage was taken very seriously by enslaved men and women at Monticello and elsewhere across the state. Enduring unions seem to have been the rule at Monticello. Records reveal only one marriage that involved separation and taking of new partners. Jefferson recognized the marriages of his slaves, regularly referring to an individual’s "husband" or "wife," and he did not separate spouses through sale or gift (although couples were sometimes temporarily separated because of their occupations). • Over the sixty years of Jefferson’s residence at Monticello, what was called "abroad" marriage (marrying outside the boundaries of the plantation) became more and more common. The expanding web of kinship made it increasingly difficult to find an unrelated spouse and young men often outnumbered young women. From the 1780s to the 1820s, adults under 45 who appear without spouses in Jefferson’s slave rolls rose from one-third of the adult population to almost two-thirds. We assume that most of the women with children but without husbands and many of the apparently "single" men had "abroad" spouses.

2. Labor at Monticello • There are no direct references to the work day for Monticello farm laborers. As was true throughout the south, they probably worked from dawn to dusk, with shorter or longer days according to the season. The work day of house servants was unpredictable, as they were "on call." Certain tradesmen doing work that could be measured were "tasked." Each day a nailer might have to make ten pounds of tenpenny nails or a cooper had to finish four flour barrels. Wagoners had to transport a certain number of logs and weavers had to produce, in summer, seven and a half yards of linen shirting. There is evidence that Jefferson designed the tasks to fill the daylight hours. In his chart of work for the spinners and weavers, their task grows with the light from January to June so that their winter work day was nine hours long, while in high summer it lasted fourteen hours. • The enslaved workers at Monticello could pursue their own activities in the evenings and on Sundays and some holidays. Many plantation owners gave their slaves Saturday afternoon off as well. Nothing has yet been found to indicate this was true at Monticello. The usual holidays on slave plantations in Virginia were Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun. There are numerous references to the Christmas holiday (usually several days long) in Jefferson's records.