Isaac Jefferson
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Isaac Jefferson, also likely known as Isaac Granger (1775 – 1846)
Although Thomas Jefferson gave Isaac and his family to his daughter Maria and her husband John Wayles Eppes in 1797 as a wedding gift, Isaac Jefferson/Granger appeared to gain his freedom by 1822 according to his memoir. In the 1840 census, he was recorded as Isaac Granger, a free man working in Petersburg, Virginia. Rev. Charles Campbell interviewed him there and published his memoir under the name of Isaac Jefferson in 1847 a year after Isaac's death. Granger/Jefferson describes Thomas Jefferson as a master and his part in the lives of his slaves.
Early life
Born into slavery in 1775, Isaac was the fourth son of
Isaac spent his childhood on the plantation near his parents. His early tasks included carrying fuel, lighting fires, and opening gates. Because Jefferson took Great George, Ursula, and their family with him to Williamsburg and Richmond when he was elected governor, the boy Isaac witnessed dramatic events during the Revolutionary War. He later recounted vivid memories of 1781, including Benedict Arnold's raid on Richmond and seeing the internment camp for captured slaves at Yorktown.[2]
Service at Monticello
Probably about 1790 at the age of 15, Isaac began his
After the household's return to Monticello, the president set up a tin shop. Isaac Granger/Jefferson recalled that it did not succeed economically. Training as a blacksmith under his older brother Little George, Isaac added to his skills. Sometime after 1794, he became a nailer as well, and was assigned to both nail making and smithing.
Marriage and family
By 1796, Granger had a wife named Iris and a son Joyce. He was working extra hours in the blacksmith shop to make chain traces, for which Jefferson paid him three pence a pair. According to Jefferson's records, Granger was a most productive nailer. In the first three months of that year, he made 507 pounds of nails in 47 days, wasting the least amount of nail rod in the process. He earned the highest daily return for his master: the equivalent of eighty-five cents a day.
Moving from Monticello
In October 1797, Thomas Jefferson gave Isaac, his wife Iris, and their sons Joyce and Squire to his daughter Maria and John Wayles Eppes as part of their marriage settlement. This was customary practice in those years by
When Jefferson's son-in-law
In 1799 and 1800, Isaac's parents and brother Little George all died within a few months of each other. While ill, the family members consulted a black
In 1812, an Isaac belonging to Thomas Mann Randolph ran away and was caught and imprisoned in Bath County. It is unknown whether this was Isaac the blacksmith. Randolph had records of owning at least one other Isaac in this period.
Freedom and memoir
How Isaac gained his freedom is unknown. His memoir recounts that he left
Twenty-first century research by the staff at Monticello discovered that Isaac Jefferson may have taken the name Isaac Granger in freedom or used it before that in the slave community.
In the early 1840s, Granger was working as a free man in Petersburg as a blacksmith, when he was interviewed by Charles Campbell, who published the account that year as the memoir of Isaac Jefferson. Granger did not say whether he took the surname Jefferson by choice or whether a white man imposed it, as was the case with his fellow Monticello slave
The fate of Isaac's wife Iris and their two sons is unknown. In 1840s, at the time of his memoir, Isaac was married to his second wife. Rev. Charles Campbell wrote that Isaac Jefferson died "a few years after these his recollections were taken down. He bore a good character." Campbell may have imposed the name Jefferson to attract more attention to his published memoir.[1]
Isaac Jefferson died in 1846. According to a document from August 20, 1846, "Isaac Jefferson having been dead more than three months & no person having applied for administration of his estate, it is ordered that the same be committed to J Branch Sergt. of this town to be by him administered according to law."
The Monticello staff have found another reference to the Granger surname in Monticello and related records: in the 1870 census of Albemarle County, an Archy Granger and his family were living at Edgehill Plantation, then owned by
References
Sources
- Jefferson at Monticello: Recollections of a Monticello Slave and a Monticello Overseer. Edited by James Adam Bear, Jr., Charlottesville, Virginia, 1967, pg. 4. This book includes recollections of Isaac Jefferson, c. 1847, and Edmund Bacon.
- The family letters of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826. Edited by Edwin Morris Betts, and James Adam Bear, Jr.
Further reading
- Ronald Seagrave, Jefferson's Isaac: From Monticello to Petersburg, Outskirts Press, 2011.
- Edna Bolling Jacques, The Hemmings Family in Buckingham County, Virginia, 2002.
- Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008
- Lucia Stanton, Slavery At Monticello, The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Inc., 1993
- Lucia Stanton, "Monticello to Main Street: The Hemings Family and Charlottesville," The Magazine of Albemarle County History, Vol 55, 1997
- Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello Monograph Series, 2000