Chapter 3: A Declaration of Their Own
NOTES
p. 57, “Isaac Jefferson lived for another seventy years. After his ten months of freedom, he spent the rest of his life enslaved”: This assertion rests on a basic principle of historical method. A historian cannot fill a gap with an unlikely interpretation simply because a surviving record is suggestive, incomplete, or makes a better story. Evidence has to be read within the world that produced it. In nineteenth-century Virginia, Black freedom was not informal. It was a legal status created by specific acts, documented in specific forms, and repeatedly registered, taxed, certified, restricted, surveilled, and policed. Under such a regime, the absence of records that would have established and maintained legal freedom is not a neutral gap. It has interpretive force.
Isaac Jefferson was free with the British in 1781 under the terms of the Philipsburg Proclamation. After Yorktown, he was returned to Jefferson and to slavery. The question is not whether Isaac experienced freedom; he did. The question is whether the record establishes that he was ever legally freed after being returned to Jefferson. It does not.
That conclusion is not new. Luther Porter Jackson of what’s now Virginia State University — the first editor of Isaac’s memoir, a civil rights legend, and the leading historian of free Black life in Virginia — investigated the question more than seventy-five years ago. Jackson’s Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860 was built from exactly the kinds of records that matter here: registers, deeds, wills, tax lists, census returns, and local public records. He knew the documentary regime of Black freedom in Virginia intimately. After Jackson’s death, Rayford W. Logan, Harvard Ph.D., chair of the History Department at Howard University, and editor of the memoir for publication, reported Jackson’s finding in his 1951 introduction: “The most exhaustive investigation by the late Professor Luther P. Jackson of Virginia State College failed to reveal any record that Isaac was a free man at that time.” Logan checked Isaac’s recollections against independently established facts, judged them substantially reliable, and endorsed Jackson’s conclusion.
That finding matters. It means that the absence of evidence for Isaac’s freedom is not merely the result of a modern reader failing to locate a missing document. A historian whose major scholarship was grounded in Virginia’s free Black records, and who was charged with the editorial responsibility for the document, looked for Isaac in the relevant evidentiary world and found no record that he was free.
Monticello nevertheless states categorically that Isaac later “gained his freedom” and that “in 1847, he was a free man in Petersburg.” It also acknowledges that how he supposedly gained that freedom is unknown. That is the methodological problem. Monticello asserts as fact a change in Isaac’s legal status that no record supports.
The source Monticello cites for Isaac’s supposed freedom in 1847 does not say that he was free. The surviving document is an 1871 fair copy of recollections Charles Campbell said he had taken down from Isaac in 1847. It says that Isaac was living in Petersburg, working as a blacksmith, and had a shop near Pocahontas Bridge. It does not identify him as free. The distinction is not semantic. The same account explicitly says that Isaac’s father, George, “got his freedom.” Campbell recorded George’s freedom and did not record Isaac’s.
Campbell understood the stakes of that distinction. He was not merely a passive transcriber. A prominent Virginia editor and historian deeply interested in the founding moment, Campbell recognized the hypocrisy in Jefferson’s professed principles of liberty and equality. When recounting that Jefferson was “mightly pleased” at the return of property in people after the British surrender, Campbell pointedly noted, “Although ‘All men by nature are free & equal,’” as a sharp editorial critique. The moral and legal distinction between slavery and freedom was visible to him. Yet Campbell did not state that Isaac became free.
Nor can Isaac’s freedom be supplied by the 1840 federal census entry for an Isaac Granger in Petersburg classified under “Free Colored Persons.” That entry does not identify the man as the Isaac Granger formerly enslaved by Thomas Jefferson (or, after 1797, Maria Jefferson Eppes). There is no evidence that Isaac chose any surname in his life (the first appearance of “Isaac Jefferson” is in Campbell’s 1871 manuscript). More importantly, a census classification could not establish when, how, or by whom legal freedom had been created. At most, it would show that a Petersburg enumerator classified a household headed by an Isaac Granger as free. It would not document emancipation. We know what that looked like: Sally Hemings was “given her time” by Martha Jefferson Randolph and allowed to live with her sons in Charlottesville. Sally was listed as a free woman on two censuses (one as white and one as a “free mulatto”) yet never given her freedom.
Under Virginia law, that distinction is decisive. Manumission required a will or written instrument proved or acknowledged in court. Free Black residents were required to register locally and carry certificates identifying themselves and the basis of their freedom. Revenue commissioners listed free Black people by name, residence, sex, and occupation. After 1806, people emancipated in Virginia ordinarily had twelve months to leave the state unless they obtained legal permission to remain; without it, they risked forfeiture of freedom and sale. Freedom, in other words, generated records because Virginia made Black freedom conditional, documentary, surveilled, and revocable.
The relevant Petersburg records survive across the period in which Isaac is said to have lived there as a free man. The city’s legal ledgers of free Black people run from 1794 through the Civil War and list other free Black residents as they registered, renewed certificates, moved, paid taxes, practiced trades, and obtained permission to remain in Virginia. Isaac does not appear in them. That absence must be read in relation to the legal regime that required such records in the first place.
This is the point of method. A single missing document may be accidental. Uneven enforcement at a particular moment may happen. But a claim that a Black man became and remained legally free in nineteenth-century Virginia has to be supported by evidence adequate to that legal world. To accept Monticello’s current account, one would have to conclude that Isaac was emancipated by an unknown person, through an unknown process; remained in Virginia through an unknown legal exception; lived openly in Petersburg as a Black blacksmith operating his own shop; and nevertheless escaped the documentary systems designed to register, tax, identify, monitor, and, when necessary, re-enslave people in exactly his supposed position. That is not responsible historical inference.
Isaac’s work as a blacksmith, his residence in Petersburg, and even his operation of a shop may demonstrate considerable practical liberty. It was not uncommon for enslaved artisans to be hired out, live apart from enslavers, work for wages in limited ways, and operate with substantial autonomy without ceasing to be enslaved. Practical latitude is not legal freedom.
The record establishes that Isaac was returned to slavery after Yorktown. It does not establish that he was subsequently emancipated. The most careful early investigators of the question, Luther P. Jackson and Rayford W. Logan, found no record that Isaac was a free man. Isaac’s own recollections do not say that he became free. Campbell’s manuscript does not say it. The Petersburg legal record does not show it. Monticello’s statement that Isaac became free is therefore not a documented fact. It is an inference presented as one, and it contradicts the evidentiary standard required by the very slave regime in which Isaac lived.
For Monticello’s current entry, see “Isaac Granger Jefferson,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. Compare the earlier Monticello entry, “Discoveries about the Family of Isaac Jefferson,” archived January 12, 2019. For Logan’s introduction and Jackson’s finding, see Rayford W. Logan, “Memoirs of a Monticello Slave,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 8, no. 4 (October 1951): 561–565, esp. 562. For Isaac’s memoir, see Life of Isaac Jefferson of Petersburg, Virginia, Blacksmith. See also Luther P. Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860.
