4  What Mr.

Jefferson didn’t hear

bonnie gord on

In 1791, when Thomas Jefferson traveled to Philadelphia as the US

Secretary of State, he left his eldest daughter Martha in charge of his
younger daughter Polly. Martha worried that Polly did not practice enough
music: “As for the harpsichord though I put it in fine order it has been to
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

little purpose till very lately. I am in hopes she will continue to attend
to that also.”1 Martha (Patsy) Jefferson had lived in Paris with her father
from the ages of twelve to eighteen, and had attended numerous musical
events there and developed into an accomplished harpsichord player.
Much of the extant music in Jefferson’s collection belonged to her.2
In addition to news about harpsichords and musical education, Martha
and her father exchanged letters about events unfolding in the French
colony of Saint Domingue, now known as Haiti: “Nothing can be more
distressing than the situation of the inhabitants, as their slaves have been
called into action, and are a terrible engine, absolutely ungovernable. . . An
army and fleet from France are expected every hour to quell the
disorders.”3 Jefferson was worried about a series of revolts that culminated
in the Haitian Revolution, which would lead to the elimination of slavery
in the colony and to its permanent independence from France.4 There is
some indication that the revolts that so concerned Jefferson might have
been catalyzed by the incantations of a mixed-race Vodou priestess,
one hot night in August 1791. The legend, which has loomed large in the

1
Martha Jefferson Randolph, to Thomas Jefferson, January 16, 1791, The Papers of Thomas
Jefferson Digital Edition, eds. Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2009).
2
The Jefferson girls both underwent a process of gender socialization much like that elaborated
by Ruth A. Solie in her essay, “‘Girling’ at the Parlor Piano,” in Music in Other Words: Victorian
Conversations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 85–117.
3
Thomas Jefferson, to Martha Jefferson Randolph, March 24, 1791, The Papers of Thomas
Copyright 2015. Cambridge University Press.

Jefferson Digital Edition.

4
See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution,
2nd edn. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963); Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution:
Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1979); and David P. Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the
108 Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY
AN: 878527 ; Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, Jeffrey Kallberg.; Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship
Account: s8440836.main.ehost
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 109

national Haitian imaginary, states that the woman – usually referred to as

an “African priestess” – sacrificed a pig representing the forest’s free
spirit. Participants reportedly soaked their fingers in the pig’s blood and
inaugurated a revolution that had been brewing for two years.5
I take the contrast between the cultivated European music of Martha
Jefferson Randolph and the incantations of the imagined Vodou priestess
as points of departure for discussing the racialization of sound and noise
in Jefferson’s Virginia. Like most of Jefferson’s daughters and grand-
daughters, Martha was an accomplished musician whose ability to read
and play Western classical music, as well as Irish and Scottish folk songs,
mattered for her self-presentation as a genteel white woman. Colonial
Americans, especially those of Martha’s ethnicity and class, embraced
cultivated and Euro-folk music, in part because European culture was
gradually becoming racialized as white. The need to identify these sound
traditions as white was related to the ongoing racialization of Afro-
diasporic musics as black – and, thus, as other – in a multiracial slave
society. As the settler population took on the task of nation building in the
early Republic, they did so in part by marking themselves as metropolitan
and cultivated, in opposition to the subordinated, enslaved, black, and
mixed-race populations.
This essay argues that music and noise in Jefferson’s world was bound
up with that nation-building project, which incorporated racial difference
as a complex but integral component. It considers the role of sound and
musical aesthetics in the emergence of race as a political and social
category, particularly in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and
in the milieu of his Virginia plantation, Monticello. In this context,
both European- and African-derived musics became thoroughly racialized
as “white” and “black,” respectively, and became part of the discourses
surrounding racial hierarchies and chattel slavery.
In sum, I argue that the silencing of “black noise” in Jeffersonian
Virginia mirrors the effective silencing by the West of the Haitian Revolu-
tion, both in its immediate aftermath and in the interim. Distinctions
between music and noise cannot be separated from race, in either of these
contexts.6 As Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman write, “Black noise

5
See Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian
Insurrection (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
6
In this essay, I mostly refer to racialized phenotype (blackness). The essay at times also moves
toward discussions of racialized geographical origins (“Africa”) and social status (enslaved,
descended from slaves, associated with slavery, or – more recently – minoritized).

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 110 bonnie gord on

represents the kinds of political aspirations that are inaudible and illegible
within the prevailing formulas of political rationality.”7 This essay listens to
Jefferson’s erasure of black sounds in conjunction with the sonic reson-
ances of the Haitian Revolution, in order to understand the silencing of
Afro-diasporic music in colonial Virginia from a broader, hemispheric
perspective.
I tune into four connected mechanisms for silencing. First, I will argue
that Jefferson silenced the sounds of the enslaved. Jeffersonian sources
effect a repressive and discursive silence or erasure, in that his music
collection and his writings about sound lack almost any reference to the
sounds of the enslaved population at Monticello. Second, US slave laws
and jurisprudence restricted musical practices, especially drumming.
Third, extra-legal (social or non-state violent) restriction by slave owners
of musicking of all kinds also regulated sounds. Finally, modern
historiographies of Jefferson, the slave south, American music, and black
music have achieved a kind of diachronic silencing.
Jefferson’s archive provides an ideal case for examining the entangle-
ment of music and sound with power structures in a racist chattel slavery
society.8 His repressive musical discourse – shaped by his status as a slave
owner with absolute power over the persons he owned – involves a quasi-
sovereign legalistic exercise of power. In fact, his inability to hear the
sounds of the enslaved allowed him to write those who labored for his
livelihood out of citizenship and ultimately out of the status of human.
At the same time, Jefferson lived in a world in which sonic practices served
as productive disciplinary regimes: bells regulated time and human labor
on plantations, and fifes and drums animated military defenses against
slave rebellions.
The essay begins, then, by discussing the music that Jefferson did hear
and noting the ways in which it was racialized as white. I go on to discuss
noise as a theoretical category, taking the soundscape of the Haitian
Revolution not just as part of a history of political unrest, but as a
kind of sonic unrest that threatened the binary categories of music
and noise, white and black, that Jefferson and others like him worked
so hard to uphold.

7
Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” Representations 92:1 (Fall 2005):
1–15.
8
My conception of power is indebted to Michel Foucault, as in Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon,
1980).

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 111

Making white music and black noise

Before turning to the racialization of black music in Jefferson’s world, it is

important to note the obvious but often unstated fact that cultivated and
folk Euro-settler musics were equally racialized, as white. As numerous
studies of settler colonialism have noted, settler populations worked to
differentiate themselves from dispossessed peoples – in this case, the
enslaved African Americans and Native Americans.9 In the slave south,
as settler colonialists began the project of nation building, leaders like
Jefferson understood the importance of building a white cultural identity
through – among other things – music.
The musical world of Thomas Jefferson has for the most part slipped
between disciplinary cracks. Music studies have always been Europe-
centered, and even ethnomusicology, which for a long time defined its
topic of study in opposition to the West, disregarded music in the United
States. But anyone who has visited Monticello or Googled the nation’s
third president, knows that the author of the Declaration of Independence
played the violin well, claimed to practice for three hours a day, and owned
some very impressive harpsichords. In a much-quoted 1778 letter to
Giovanni Fabbroni, an Italian naturalist and economist, Jefferson
explained that music is “the favorite passion of my soul.” By this, he clearly
meant European music. He went on to ask Fabbroni to find musicians who
could make an orchestra at Monticello.10 And, writing in 1785 to his friend
Charles Bellini while in Paris, he explained, “The last of them, [music]
particularly, is an enjoyment, the deprivation of which with us, cannot be
calculated. I am almost ready to say, it is the only thing which from my
heart I envy them, and which, in spite of all the authority of the Decalogue,
I do covet.”11
The music that Jefferson collected likewise remains obscure within the
music disciplines. American music studies generally focus on the twentieth
century; and most of the music Jefferson collected is, by received aesthetic

9
On settler colonialism, see Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon:
Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,”
American Historical Review 106:5 (December 2001): 1692–720; and Fiona Bateman and Lionel
Pilkington, eds., Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (Houndmills and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
10
Thomas Jefferson, to Giovanni Fabbroni, June 8, 1778, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Digital Edition.
11
Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Bellini, September 30, 1785, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Digital Edition.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 112 bonnie gord on

standards, not very good. It thus stands well outside the Western musical
canon. Some of his favorite composers included Campioni, Hayden
(not Haydn), and Schobert (not Schubert). None of these composers can
compete with Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven in the annals of music
history. The folk tunes too elude scholarship: they are too stylized and
Euro-derived to entice ethnomusicologists, and too “unrefined” to entice
historians of Western art music.
Rather than simply amassing printed music, Jefferson had it bound into
volumes, in an attempt to preserve sheet music and smaller works.12
Among other things, the volumes contain old editions of music from
London’s pleasure gardens, such as Thomas Arne’s Thomas and Sally, a
volume of music for Spanish guitar, French harpsichord sonatas, and
arrangements of popular Scottish ballads for various instruments. The
collection also includes manuscript music notebooks that his wife and
in-laws owned and used to copy favorite tunes, exercises, and other musical
notes. His wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, copied keyboard exercises, popu-
lar songs, and short pieces by the likes of Handel and Arne. It also contains
a large hardbound book inscribed “John Wayles,” who was Jefferson’s
father-in-law. This eclectic volume mixes drinking songs and selections
from popular ballad operas. The drinking songs, with titles like “Come
Fill Me a Bumper” and “Sparkling Champagne,” are pasted on the back
pages, taken from a newspaper called the Bristol Journal. Finally, Jefferson’s
well-known scrapbooks record numerous musical performances.13
The collection, like Jefferson’s writings, lacks almost any reference to
the sounds of the enslaved population at Monticello, comprised mostly of
individuals of West African descent. Despite the demonstrable presence of
enslaved musicians, Jefferson mentions African Americans making music
exactly twice in his entire large and well-catalogued collection of written
materials. Enter the problem of archival silence. Historical musicologists
are a source- and text-based discipline, and we depend on written archives.
Yet the sounds of non-white musicians are often absent from the colonial
written record, because of racialized structures of preservation and value.
In listening to this silence, I take my cue take my cue from Michel-Rolph
Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, which works to render audible historical

12
Helen Cripe, Thomas Jefferson and Music, rev. edn. (Charlottesville, VA: Thomas Jefferson
Foundation, 2009).
13
For an extensive discussion of Jefferson as collector, see Emily Gale, “A Presidential
Songcatcher: Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks,” paper presented at the symposium Soundscapes
of Jefferson’s America, University of Virginia, March 2010.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 113

omissions of the Haitian Revolution.14 Unlike the American and French

revolutions, the Haitian Revolution did not make it into histories of that
great age of revolution until the 1970s. For a long time, this black revolu-
tion remained tacit in the annals of western history, in part because it was
enacted by largely non-literate slaves (and thus was not preceded or backed
by a learned public oppositional discourse). Likewise, the music and sound
of the enslaved remain tacit because they existed outside the written
tradition and the written record.
Trouillot starts with the assumption that if there is silence, there must
have been silencing, and he takes the Haitian Revolution as an exemplary
silence in history. The Revolution was all but unthinkable in its own time,
as few beyond enslaved Haitians could imagine black slaves having the
desire, will, and capacity to overthrow a colonial power. For Trouillot, this
historiography exemplifies the power of the archive to define what is and is
not a legitimate object of research and mention. Indeed, revolutionaries
who were enslaved enter into the written historical record of the Haitian
Revolution only during interrogations by French officers. The powers of
technology, literacy, publication, and information were at the time all
owned and operated by the French colonial powers. Thus, in Western
historiography, the Haitian Revolution, in contrast to what is imagined as
the enlightened movements of the French and American Revolutions, was
imagined as one of animalistic slave violence.
In the story of the Haitian Revolution, silence is a metaphor for the
erasure of history and the archives. But the story of Jefferson and black
noise is also one of literally blocking noise. Theorists of audio culture
tend to posit noise as arising in the nineteenth century with the noise of
capitalist industry. Yet noise has been a tacit organizer of sonic space –
and of the powers implied by those spaces – for much longer. Jefferson is
a prime example. His listening practices effectively marked African
American sounds as noise, not music. While he used music of the
European elite and folk traditions for nation building, he erased and
excluded the sounds of the African American cultures that surrounded
him as a symbolic way of denying them citizenship and status as
humans.15

14
See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 1995).
15
One exception to Jefferson’s exclusive listening was his accommodation of Native cultures–but
he heard them only because propping them up served to counter European claims for the
inherent degeneracy of the New World.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 114 bonnie gord on

Jefferson believed in quietude. As Mark Smith and others have argued,

southern planters understood quietude not just as the absence of sound,
but also as the placid tranquility of their own order.16 Noise, on the other
hand, symbolized rebellion, dissent, and chaos. Historical descriptions
of the Haitian Revolution, for example, commonly stress noise. A white
French prisoner who was taken prisoner in Haiti wrote that, “Hearing the
noise they were making, I jumped out of my bed and shouted: ‘Who goes
there?’ A voice like thunder answered me: ‘It is death!’ At the same time,
I heard a considerable number of gunshots and the voice of hordes of
blacks who filled the house.”17 And in Virginia, Nat Turner’s rebellion
began with supernatural noise. While working in the slave owner’s fields
on May 12, Turner “heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit
instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ
had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should
take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching
when the first should be last and the last should be first.”18
In Western culture, noise has long been associated with discord, chaos,
rebellion, and otherness. Plato made a distinction between music and
noise, relegating to the category of noise the clamorous sounds of those
who did not fit his moral and political order. Indeed, Plato’s worries about
sound might well come out of the mouths and pens of nervous twentieth-
century critics of rock and roll, jazz, or hip hop: “The introduction of novel
fashions in music is a thing to beware of as endangering the whole fabric of
society, whose most important conventions are unsettled by any revolu-
tions in that quarter.”19 For Plato, music’s ability to inflame the passions
led to massive injustice, conflict, and an explosion of laws that futilely
attempted to control society. In the 1980s, Jacques Attali, riffing on Plato,
argued that the process of distinguishing music from noise allows the
consolidation of community:
Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and
control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political. More than colors

16
See Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2001).
17
As cited in Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian
Insurrection (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 50.
18
Nat Turner and Thomas Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late
Insurrection in Southampton, VA. As Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R. Gray
(Richmond, VA: Thomas R. Gray, 1832), 9–10.
19
Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (London: Oxford
University Press, 1945), 115.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 115

and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise
is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its
opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among
men. Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony.20

Attali’s ideas explain Jefferson’s attitude towards sound and the plantation
in some important ways, especially his concept that sound can orchestrate
social codes.
If a historical politics of exclusion has marked African American
sonic and political spaces as negative, those negative spaces were and
are far from silent. And here I am thinking of negative space as what
Fred Moten has explained as the tendency of black aesthetics to project
unintelligible gestures that white hegemonic logics use to confirm the
irrationality of blackness.21 In historical terms, to hear these negative
spaces or hear the sounds rendered unintelligible – and thus not worthy
of mention – means staying attuned to the sounds that Jefferson must
have heard but never discussed. Despite the fact that Jefferson spent
hours riding through his plantation, his writings make it seem as if he
had never heard a corn-shucking song, or any other slave song, for that
matter.
Jefferson kept noise outside. When he built Monticello, he built it on
a hill with the slave quarters known as Mulberry Row below. Craig
Barton has argued that the views from the Monticello east portico
“actively deny the presence of the black body. Through the manipula-
tion of the landscape section and placement of the volume of the winged
dependencies, Jefferson skillfully rendered invisible the slaves and their
place of work from the important symbolic view of the property.”22
Jefferson also tried to cancel African American sound. He installed plate
glass windows, which, in addition to blocking rain and cold while
admitting sunlight, cancelled unwelcome sounds. The glass windows
seem especially significant here. Murray Schafer writes, that
“With indoor living, two things developed antonymously: the high art
of music, and noise pollution – for the noises were the sounds that
were kept outside. After art music had moved indoors, street music

20
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 6.
21
See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
22
Craig Evan Barton, “Duality and Invisibility: Race and Memory in the Urbanism of the
American South,” in Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 4.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 116 bonnie gord on

became an object of particular scorn.”23 The glass windows orchestrated

Jefferson’s soundscape, blocking out sounds.
In addition to keeping the sounds of the enslaved out of the house,
Jefferson practiced what Franz Boas described in 1889 as “sound blind-
ness”: “The characteristic feature of sound-blindness is inability to perceive
the essential peculiarities of certain sounds.”24 Boas was responding to
linguists who claimed that native languages had alternating sounds or
sonic inconsistencies that reflected Native American linguistic inferiority,
and thus social inferiority to white English speakers. Boas argued that
linguists misheard Native American languages: that they literally could
not hear the sounds of the other.
In the American slave-holding south, things that were misheard or not
heard at all fell into the category of noise – one that came with racialized
connotations that were deeply tied to the chattel slave system. Jon Cruz
explains,

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century black music appears to have been heard by
captors and overseers primarily as noise – that is, as strange, unfathomable, and
incomprehensible. However, with the rise of the abolitionist movement, black song
making became considered increasingly as a font of black meanings.25

Before Frederick Douglass and the essentially ethnographic “discovery” of

slave songs, learned white discourse did not register African American
music as a creative or skilled activity. Dominant white auralities obscured
spirituals altogether, and instrumental skills like fiddling mattered mostly
because they increased the value of a slave and provided an identifying
feature to catch them if they ran away.
Cruz reads Frederick Douglass’s now-famous descriptions as prompting
a crucial turn in how whites heard and interpreted slaves’ singing. Dou-
glass’s descriptions of masters making slaves sing also points up that
musicianship of the enslaved was both an instrument of white sovereignty
and a source of black resistance: an instrumental practice that made the
work go faster and that allowed for some independence of expression.
Douglass wrote that the songs of slaves “told a tale of woe which was then
altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long,
and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over

23
R. Murray Schafer, “Music, Non-Music and the Soundscape,” in Companion to Contemporary
Musical Thought, ed. John Paynter et al. (London: Routledge, 1992), 35.
24
Franz Boas, “On Alternating Sounds,” American Anthropologist 2:1 (1889): 47.
25
Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural
Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 43.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 117

with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was testimony against slavery and a
prayer to god for deliverance from chains.”26 Here Douglass calls out the
misreading of the meaning of slave music (both sonically and lyrically);
he also highlights song as an instrument of control by masters. “Slaves are
generally expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave is not liked
by masters or overseers. ‘Make a noise,’ ‘make a noise,’ and ‘bear a hand’
are the words usually addressed to the slaves when there is silence amongst
them.”27 Douglass’s remark highlights the conflation of slave music and
noise, and the demand that slaves perform their contentedness through
making music.
The categories of silence, quietude, music, and noise are radically con-
tingent, and in the context of southern chattel slavery they were highly
racialized. Overseers encouraged slaves to sing while they worked: for
example, an article entitled “Management of the Negro” stated, “When at
work, I have no objection to their whistling or singing some lively tune,
but no drawling tunes are allowed in the field, for their motions are almost
certain to keep time with the music.”28 And we know that at slave
markets – particularly at the largest one, in New Orleans – slave traders
made slaves dance in order to show off their bodies. Solomon Northup,
a free black from Saratoga, New York, who was kidnapped and sold
into slavery, remembered this practice at the New Orleans market:
After being fed, in the afternoon, we were again paraded and made to dance. Bob,
a colored boy, who had some time belonged to Freeman, played on the violin.
Standing near him, I made bold to inquire if he could play the “Virginia Reel.”
He answered he could not, and asked me if I could play. Replying in the
affirmative, he handed me the violin. I struck up a tune, and finished it. Freeman
ordered me to continue playing, and seemed well pleased, telling Bob that I far
excelled him – a remark that seemed to grieve my musical companion
very much.29

26
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 6th edn.
(London: H. G. Collins, 1851), 19.
27
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 19.
28
“Management of Negroes,” in James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, The Industrial Resources,
etc. of the Southern and Western States (New York: Office of De Bow’s Review, 1852), 335.
29
The literary genre of the slave narrative grew out of enslaved people giving accounts of their
experiences. When enslaved persons themselves were not literate, they communicated their
experiences to (often white) literate interlocutors who then published the books. Northup
published his memoire in 1853 with the help of David Wilson, a local white writer. Solomon
Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York,
Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855), 79.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 118 bonnie gord on

There is no reason to believe that Jefferson would have stood outside the
link between song and labor that permeated plantation culture. His daugh-
ters sang corn-shucking songs and rowing songs taught to them by the
enslaved women who raised them. Shucking songs passed the time during
the arduous corn shelling that followed a harvest, and rowing songs
regulated rowing. In 1863, the former slave Francis Frederick described
corn-shucking songs: “Some of the masters make their slaves shuck the
corn. All the slaves stand on one side of the heap, and throw the ears over,
which are then cribbed. This is the time when the whole country far and
wide resounds with the corn-songs.”30 As Frederick tells it, masters saw
slaves shucking and asked them if they were going to sing, and the slaves
began to sing.
George Tucker, whom Jefferson appointed as Professor of Philosophy at
the University of Virginia and who was an avid anti-abolitionist, presented
a vivid description of corn songs in his 1824 novel The Valley of the
Shenandoah, which was set on a Virginia plantation in 1796:
The corn songs of these humble creatures would please you . . . for some of them
have a small smack of poetry, and are natural at expressions of kind and amiable
feelings—such as, praise of their master. . . The air of these songs has not much
variety or melody, and requires not more flexibility of voice than they all possess,
as they all join in the chorus. . . [T]here are thousands among us, who never
attended a corn-shocking, or even heard a corn song—so entirely separated are
the two classes of black and white, and so little curiosity does that excite.31

Here Tucker is not willing to call the tunes music, but he does seem to
admonish the tendency of white slaveholders to remain deaf to their
sounds.
If blacks and whites heard music differently, they also heard bells
differently. Time at Monticello was marked by bells. Jefferson had a varied
collection of bells that kept Monticello running, and slaves rang most of
those bells. The bells served as sonic instruments of domination that
compelled slaves into action. Bells regulated every aspect of time for whites
and blacks, but the resonance of that regulation had deeply racialized
overtones. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson was well aware of the power of bells.
When ordering gongs for the house, he specified that they make sounds

30
Francis Frederick, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky: A Narrative by Francis Fedric, Escaped
Slave/Edited with an introduction and notes by C. L Innes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2010), 43.
31
As cited in Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 172–73.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 119

“which might be heard all over my farm.”32 Bells were the metronome that
marked plantation time. Alain Corbin has read bells in nineteenth-century
French parishes as representing victory over chaos and creating a commu-
nity through the territorializing potential of sound.33 Likewise, Jefferson
understood that loud bells created and marked communities. In 1825,
while looking for a perfect bell for the University of Virginia’s Rotunda,
Jefferson wrote, “We want a bell which can generally be heard at the
distance of 2 miles, because this will ensure its being always heard in
Charlottesville.”34 In 1949, Charles Bullock recalled, “Peter Fossett,
as footman, had to run to open the gate upon the arrival or departure
of vehicles. There was a large bell which was rung upon the arrival or
departure of ones to Monticello, whether by foot or riding.”35 In February
of 1815, George Ticknor, who was visiting from Massachusetts, wrote,
The afternoon and evening passed as on the two days previous; for everything is
done with such regularity, that when you know how one day is filled, I suppose you
know how it is with the others. At eight o’clock the first bell is rung in the great
hall, and at nine the second summons you to the breakfast-room, where you find
everything ready. After breakfast every one goes, as inclination leads him, to his
chamber, the drawing-room, or the library. The children retire to their school-
room with their mother, Mr. Jefferson rides to his mills on the Rivanna, and
returns at about twelve. At half past three the great bell rings, and those who are
disposed resort to the drawing-room, and the rest go to the dining-room at the
second call of the bell, which is at four o’clock.36

The bell activated human labor, so that both people and bells served as
instruments of Jefferson’s designs.
And we know that even the drum, which was heavily regulated because
of its associations with slave insurrections, was played at Monticello, as
Isaac Jefferson recalled in a memoir recounting his life on the plantation.

32
Thomas Jefferson, to Henry Remsen, November 13, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Digital Edition.
33
See Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French
Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
34
Thomas Jefferson, to Joseph Coolidge, April 12, 1825, Jefferson, Thomas, and others. Letters to
and from Jefferson, 1825, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.lib.
virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Jef10Gr.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/
english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=56&division=div1 (accessed July 29, 2014).
35
Charles H. Bullock, to Pearl Graham, Howard University Archives, Washington, DC.
Bullock had heard this when he drove Rev. Peter Fossett (1815–1901) up to Monticello in 1900,
when the former slave came from Ohio to visit his boyhood home.
36
George Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, 2 vols. (Boston, MA: James
R. Osgood and Company, 1876), 1:36.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 120 bonnie gord on

Isaac, an enslaved blacksmith, was by 1847 a free black man working in

Petersburg, where the Reverend Charles Campbell interviewed him
and later published the interviews as a “memoir.” In the memoir, Isaac
(speaking of himself) states,
Isaac larnt to beat drum about this time. Bob Anderson a white man was a
blacksmith. Mat Anderson was a black man & worked with Bob. Bob was a fifer
Mat was a drummer. Mat bout that time was sort a-makin love to Mary Hemings.
The soldiers at Richmond, in the camp at Bacon Quarter Branch would come every
two or three days to salute the Governor at the Palace, marching about there
drumming & fifing. Bob Anderson would go into the house to drink; Mat went
into the kitchen to see Mary Hemings. He would take his drum with him into the
kitchen & set it down there. Isaac would beat on it & Mat larnt him how to beat.37

Jefferson supposedly gave the enslaved Scott family special treatment,

perhaps because of their musical ability. In 1880, Orra Langhorne, a
Virginia suffragette and oral historian, visited the last living Scott. As
Robert Scott reported, “the taste for music shown by his family had early
attracted Mr. Jefferson’s notice, as he dearly loved music himself, and he
had taken much kindly interest in the family.”38 Jefferson, in other words,
gave preferential treatment to certain slaves, based in part on their musical
aptitude.

Noise and Jefferson’s scientific racism

The politics of noise at Monticello and in Jefferson’s writings cannot be

disconnected from his scientific racism. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of
Virginia was fundamental to the codification of scientific racism in the new
Republic, and was in turn instrumental in upholding and justifying
the slavery system. While Jefferson’s views were not unique, he was one
of the first in the new nation to write about them.39 Robert P. Forbes
has persuasively argued that Jefferson wrote the book in part to combat
growing critiques of slavery by the Europeans and that he worked to

37
Isaac Jefferson, “Life of Isaac Jefferson of Petersburg, Virginia, Blacksmith” (1847), http://
encyclopediavirginia.org/_Life_of_Isaac_Jefferson_of_Petersburg_Virginia_Blacksmith_by_
Isaac_Jefferson_1847 (accessed June 13, 2014).
38
Orra Langhorne, Southern Sketches from Virginia, 1881–1901, ed. Charles E. Wynes
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964), 82.
39
For the classic treatment of Jefferson’s position in discussions of race, see Winthrop D. Jordan,
White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1970).

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 121

map the slaveholder’s understanding of slaves as chattel onto an

Enlightenment world view.40 Notes on the State of Virginia sits squarely
in the tradition of natural history, whose purpose was in essence to
observe, compare, measure, and order humans animals.41 The genealogy
of modern racism is inextricably intertwined with the classification of race
in natural histories. Indeed, when Jefferson made Africans the subject of
natural history, they became objects for study, not subjects: or, to put it
differently, species of animals, not humans. The book directly engages
Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who in his Histoire Naturelle
argued that all species of the New World were degenerate.42 And, more
broadly, it attempts to present Jefferson’s interpretations of Virginia – as a
stand-in for the United States in general – to a wide philosophical
audience.
In making his case for the supposed inferiority of blacks, Jefferson wrote,
“I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether origin-
ally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior
to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”43 Jefferson’s use
of the word “suspicion” ought not to soften his statements: the book as a
whole makes a sustained argument for racial hierarchy. He concludes, for
example, that “it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the
whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be
found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigation of Euclid;
and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”44
Note here that by 1829, the black abolitionist David Walker was already
refuting these claims:
Will not a lover of natural history, then, one who views the gradations in all the
races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in
the department of MAN as distinct as nature has formed them? – I hope you will

40
Robert P. Forbes, “Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson and the Imperative of Race,”
Torrington Articles (2012). Available at: http://works.bepress.com/robert_forbes/3 (accessed
June 20, 2014).
41
There is a vast literature on Jefferson and race in Notes on the State of Virginia. See, for example,
Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2000), 65–70, 147–69; and David Tucker, Enlightened
Republicanism: A Study of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Plymouth, UK: Lexington
Books, 2008).
42
George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, 3rd edn. trans.
William Smellie (London: A. Strahan, 1791).
43
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: printed for John Stockdale,
1787), 239.
44
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 232.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 122 bonnie gord on

try to find out the meaning of this verse – its widest sense and all its bearings:
whether you do or not, remember the whites do. This very verse, brethren, having
emanated from Mr. Jefferson, a much greater philosopher the world never
afforded, has in truth injured us more, and has been as great a barrier to our
emancipation as any thing that has ever been advanced against us. I hope you will
not let it pass unnoticed.45

Walker argued that, in fact, Jefferson’s Notes was a provocative document

that should incite slaves to protest and flee.
Jefferson supported his conclusion about the supposed inferiority of
black persons in his few discussions of their musicality. As noted, he
mentioned African American music-making exactly twice, in Query XIV
(“Laws”) of the Notes on the State of Virginia: “In music they are more
generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and
they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they
will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of
complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.”46 With the word “catch,”
Jefferson was referring to the English tradition of three-voice rounds,
usually for unaccompanied male singers. These songs, which typically
had light and bawdy texts, circulated aurally rather than in print; as such,
they hardly met Enlightenment aesthetic ideals of cultivated music.
And he argued that they could not even achieve creativity, aesthetics, or
rational thought.47 “Their existence appears to participate more of sensa-
tion than reflection,” he wrote. In other words, he regarded blacks as equal
in memory, but inferior in reason, more ardent, but less sophisticated.
Arguing against any potential for a black aesthetic, Jefferson wrote,
“Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is
the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the
senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis
Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published
under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”48
His second mention appears in a famous footnote documenting the
slaves’ performance on the banjar (the northwest African ancestor of the
modern banjo): “The instrument proper to them is the Banjar, which they

45
David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 31.
46
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 233–34.
47
Jefferson’s ideas were in keeping with others of his time. The French had also long used
scientific racism to justify slavery and persecution. For instance, Jefferson’s ideas corresponded
in some ways to those of Buffon, who was in fact an implied interlocutor of his text.
48
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 234.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 123

brought hither from Africa, and which is the original of the guitar, its
chords being precisely the four lower chords of the guitar.”49 Jefferson
acknowledges some degree of musicality, but no aesthetic originality.
To take this one step further, blacks were denied a musical voice; this is
why, despite his obsessive touring of his plantation, Jefferson appears
never to have heard a work song. Jefferson’s refusal to assimilate African
Americans into his nation-building project is by now well known.
Catharine Holland explains:
In a very important sense, slaves cannot be fully or comfortably integrated as
American citizens within the terms of Jeffersonian nationalism because they are,
paradoxically enough, not products of American nature but creations of the law
itself, or more precisely, of what is most injudicious in American law.50

This is not just a passive erasure. Holland writes that within Jefferson’s
conception of what we might call a body politic, “the black body figures as
a principle of dissonance and disharmony in the national present.”51
To push her musical metaphor further, the sounds Jefferson heard from
black musicians simply did not fit into his scheme of musical nation
building, even as he heard them. Their music, like their bodies, troubled
his notion of what constituted American music. This seems especially
ironic today, given that the vast majority of what is understood as
American music emerged from African American culture.

A different tune

When Jefferson talked at all about emancipation, he embraced a forced

deportation of freed slaves to Africa. His proposal reflected deep anxieties
on the part of American slaveholders; and, indeed, the Haitian Revolution
likely affirmed his anxieties. Thousands of white planters and free people
of color came to the United States in the early 1800s, many of them with
slaves. The same period also saw a series of attempted slave rebellions
in the United States, which some attributed to the influx of Haitians.
The Haitian Revolution implicitly threatened Jefferson’s understanding

49
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 233–34. See also Jay Scott Odell and Robert B. Winans,
“Banjo,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.
oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/01958 (accessed March 26, 2013).
50
Catherine A. Holland, The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the
American Political Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2001), 35.
51
Holland, The Body Politic, 42.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 124 bonnie gord on

of black slaves as inherently incapable of self-governance and resistance.

Slavery as an American institution depended on the assumption that
enslaved Africans and their descendants could not imagine or demand
freedom because they were subhuman, incapable of imagination, creativity,
and reason, as Jefferson’s multiple writings on slavery assert.
When slaves rose up against 60,000 of Napoleon’s troops, the effects of
the revolution rippled through the United States – a slave society that,
although founded on liberal principles of freedom and equality, restricted
these rights to white men of means. In the Anglo-American imagination of
the francophone Caribbean, Haiti came to embody a reign of terror.
Official US discourse cast Haitian revolutionaries as criminals bent on
devastation, while casting their own revolutionaries as self-sacrificing
patriots.
Jefferson, like other slaveholders, understood the events of the Haitian
Revolution as potentially dangerous. In 1793, in the wake of the bloody
start to the Revolution, he wrote, “The situation of the St. Domingo
fugitives (aristocrats as they are) calls aloud for pity and charity. Never
was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man. . . I become daily
more and more convinced that all the West India Island will remain in the
hands of the people of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or
later take place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which
our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Potomac),
have to wade through and try to avert them.”52 Finally, in 1799, he wrote,
“If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever,
we have to fear it.”53
For enslaved blacks, the Haitian Revolution meant something
completely different: it signified hope. Moreover, Caribbean slaves who
were shipped to Louisiana and sold throughout the South brought with
them an understanding of a republic with racial equality. In 1797, Prince
Hall, an African American who fought in the American Revolution, said
the following words to the Boston African Masonic Lodge: “My brethren,
let us not be cast down under these and many other abuses we at present
labour under: for the darkest is before the break of day. . . Let us remember
what a dark day it was with our African brethren, six years ago, in the
French West Indies. Nothing but the snap of the whip was heard, from

52
Thomas Jefferson, to James Monroe, July 14, 1793, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital
Edition.
53
Thomas Jefferson, to James Madison, February 12, 1799, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Digital Edition.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 125

morning to evening.”54 David Walker, in the address discussed above, had

called on his readers to “go to our brethren, the Haytians [sic], who,
according to their word, are bound to protect and comfort us.”55 He clearly
meant for his readers to follow the Haitians in instigating insurrections.
Since it occurred, the Haitian Revolution has been associated with an
event that may or may not have occurred at Bois Caïman. One of the first
written accounts of this ceremony was produced in 1793–95 by Antoine
Dalmas, a French surgeon who fled to the United States following the
revolution:
They celebrated a sort of feast or sacrifice in the middle of a wooded untilled plot
on the Choiseul plantation, called le Caïman, where a very large number of
Negroes assembled. An entirely black pig, surrounded by fetishes [fétiches], loaded
with offerings each more bizarre than the other was the holocaust offered to the
all-powerful spirit [génie] of the black race. The rituals that the negroes conducted
while cutting its throat, the avidity with which they drank of his blood, the value
they set in possessing a few of his bristles, a sort of talisman which, according to
them, was to render them invulnerable, all serve to characterize Africans. That
such an ignorant and besotted caste would make the superstitious rituals of an
absurd and sanguinary religion serve as a prelude to the most frightful crimes was
to be expected.56

Dalmas’s narrative reflects his position as an exiled colonist, especially in

its mixture of an obvious racism with an essentialized exoticism about
African religious practices. Another description is from the Lettre annuelle
de l’Ordre de Notre Dame, first published in 1887:

The king of the cult of Voodoo had just declared war on the colonists. His brow
girded with a diadem and accompanied by the queen of the cult, wearing a red sash
and shaking a box [rattle] garnished with bells and containing a snake, they
marched to the assault on the cities of the colony. . . They came to lay siege to
Cap Français. By the glimmer of the great smoldering fires, punctuated by the
silhouette of the spectacular rounds, the sisters perceived from the windows of
their Monastery, overlooking the countryside and the city, barebreasted Negresses
belonging to the sect, dancing to the mournful sound of the long, narrow

54
Prince Hall, “A Charge of 1797,” in Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky, eds.,
Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1960
(New York: Routledge, 2001), 47.
55
Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 58.
56
Antoine Dalmas, Histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue: depuis le commencement des
troubles, jusqu’à la prise de Jérémie et du Môle S. Nicolas par les Anglais; suivie d’un Mémoire sur
le rétablissement de cette colonie (Paris: Mame frères, 1814), cited and translated in Leon-
Francois Hoffman, Haitian Fiction Revisited (Pueblo, CO: Passeggiata Press, 1999), 161.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 126 bonnie gord on

tambourines and conch shells, and alternating with the moaning of the sacrificed
creatures. In the midst of the rebels was Zamba Boukman, urging them on to the
assault on the barracks and the convent, which held a good number of young girls
and other colonists. He reminded them in his poetic improvisations that the whites
were damned by God because they were the oppressors of the blacks, whom they
crushed without pity, and he ended each refrain with these words: ‘Couté la liberté
li palé coeur nous tous.’57

This romanticized and exoticized description positions the ceremony as a

moment of sonic uprising: a moment made sacred and holy by song,
instruments, and dancing.58
We know very little about the actual soundscape of the Haitian Revolu-
tion, but drumming and charismatic incantation played a vital part in the
white imaginary of the event. The role of subaltern spiritual leadership in
the Haitian uprising is a matter of vituperative debate. But the idea that
this subaltern musical spiritual practice instigated the rebellion remains
strong, and in some ways it is the legend itself and the fears it inspired that
interest me most.
The Haitian Revolution, like slave revolts in the United States, was
associated with martial and religious drumming. US slave owners heard
slave drumming as chaotic and threatening. As Dena Epstein and Richard
Rath have shown, by the time the Atlantic slave trade was consolidated,
white Europeans and Americans tended to hear drums as powerful instru-
ments of black African power and, potentially, revolt.59 The French Code
Noir, first established by Louis XIV in 1685, defined slavery in the French
colonies, prohibited religious practices outside of Catholicism, and

57
As cited in Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 265–66.
58
Interestingly, the French colonists’ exoticizing narratives have since been appropriated by
modern Protestant Haitians and other evangelicals as a basis for casting the Haitian Revolution
as diabolical. See Elizabeth McAlister, “From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The
Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History,” Studies in Religion 41:2 (2012): 187–215. Speaking
about the Haitian earthquake of 2010, Pat Robertson also referred to the ceremony at Bois
Caïman as a pact with the Devil. “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people
might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon
the Third and whatever. . .and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will
serve you if you get us free from the prince. . .true story. . .so the devil said okay, it’s a deal.
And they kicked the French out. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”
The Huffington Post, March 3, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/pat-robertson-
tornadoes-prayer_n_1321686.html (accessed June 20, 2014).
59
See Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1977); and Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 127

regulated the actions and activities of all blacks. It legislated against ritual
assembly, drumming, and dancing. It also banned all drumming and
incantations of non-Christian African religions. In 1704, the government
issued an ordinance that forbade dance and assemblies, especially on
Sundays and holidays. By the 1780s, white slaveholders were very anxious
about what they understood to be nighttime magical gatherings.60
American slaveholders were just as anxious about drumming. In 1740,
South Carolina prohibited slaves “using and keeping drums, horns or other
loud instruments.” This was in response to the Stono Rebellion of 1739, in
which descriptions of drums were very prevalent. “They were less than
exhausted and more than a ragged band of enslaved men some exhausted
but exhilarated from their nights labors, two drummers announcing their
progression and a flag bearer at their head.”61 Other states quickly followed
South Carolina’s example.
The French army marched to battle with bands known as corps de
musique. Like the bands that accompanied colonial American militias,
these groups featured snare drums and trumpets, which were meant to
impose sonic order on the battlefield. Eyewitness accounts of slave revolts
also suggest that armies of free blacks, slaves, and Maroons moved to the
sounds of drums, conch shells and trumpets.62 By the time the revolution
was in full swing, soldiers reported that rebels marched toward them
singing what they described as African songs, punctuated by religious
incantations from leaders.63
Incantations or no, Jefferson was correct to fear the Haitian Revolution
and to view slaves and Haitian revolutionaries as forces that in the
end could not be contained, despite the best efforts of the slave system.
When hundreds of Haitian refugees arrived in Virginia, beginning in
1793, they brought with them slaves who had experienced successful
revolts. The revolution thus reverberated through the American South,
and slave owners were correct to read insurrections as related to the
revolts in Saint Domingue. For instance, Virginia Governor James

60
For a detailed discussion of the spiritual practices of revolutionary Saint Domingue, see Kate
Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (University of Chicago Press,
2011), 24–52.
61
Peter Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 103.
62
For a discussion of these accounts, see Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and
Race in the Americas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2010), 24–78.
63
For a study of particular slave and Maroon armies, see Jean Fouchard, The Haitian
Maroons: Liberty or Death, trans. A. Faulkner Watts (New York: Blyden Press, 1981).

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 128 bonnie gord on

Monroe speculated that Gabriel’s rebellion, led by the enslaved black-

smith Gabriel Prosser in 1800, was probably inspired by the recent events
in Haiti: “occurrences in St. Domingo for some years past. . .doubtless did
excite some sensation among our Slaves.”64
Southern Louisiana was especially ripe for this kind of rebellion during
pre-Lentian festivities, when slaves, free men and women, and Creoles of
high society mingled at balls and at the theater. Slaveholders in this
region rightly feared unruly mixed-race and black slaves from the erupting
Caribbean. Indeed, the largest slave revolt of the period occurred in
southern Louisiana in 1811 and was led by Charles Deslondes, reputed
to be a free person of color from Saint Domingue. Slaveholders were
frightened by the prospect of a military operation organized by a black
man who had come from Saint Domingue. In this well-orchestrated revolt,
between 150 and 500 rebels stormed New Orleans in military formation,
waving flags, beating drums, and following Haitian migrants. By all
accounts, the sight of slaves in military formation with drums stunned
witnesses.65
The sounds of the Haitian Revolution and of the North American
rebellions it helped to incite loomed large in the nineteenth-century
literary imagination. Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, a novella that
implicitly addresses the Haitian Revolution, was first published serially
in Putman’s Monthly in 1855.66 In Melville’s story about a slave ship,
the main character’s imperial vision gives way to terrified white aurality
as the black slaves on the boat begin to revolt. Delano’s imperial gaze
comes through most clearly as he watches the “negresses” caring for their
children:
There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love, thought Captain Delano,
well pleased. This incident prompted him to remark the other negresses more
particularly than before. He was gratified with their manners: like most uncivilized
women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution; equally
ready to die for their infants or fight for them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses;
loving as doves. Ah! thought Captain Delano, these, perhaps, are some of the very

64
As cited in Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800
and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 169.
65
For a summary of sources and debates around the details of this insurrection, see Robert L.
Paquette, “‘A Horde of Brigands?’ The Great Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811 Reconsidered,”
Historical Reflections 35:1 (2005): 73–96.
66
Sidney Kaplan, American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays 1949–1989 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 159.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 129

women whom Ledyard saw in Africa, and gave such a noble account of.
These natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his confidence and ease.67

The character Delano refers to here is John Ledyard, an eighteenth-century

mariner who explored Africa and the South Seas and ultimately sailed with
Captain Cook. When Delano realizes that the slaves are rebelling, he is
terrified by their shrieks, calls, and singing:
Soon the ship was beyond the gun’s range, steering broad out of the bay; the blacks
thickly clustering round the bowsprit, one moment with taunting cries towards the
whites, the next with upthrown gestures hailing the now dusky moors of ocean –
cawing crows escaped from the hand of the fowler. . . Huddled upon the long-boat
amidships, the negresses raised a wailing chant, whose chorus was the clash of the
steel. . . For a few breaths’ space, there was a vague, muffled, inner sound, as of
submerged sword-fish rushing hither and thither through shoals of black-fish.
Soon, in a reunited band, and joined by the Spanish seamen, the whites came to the
surface, irresistibly driving the negroes toward the stern.68

The terror of slave revolution, for Melville’s fictive colonial subject, is in

part a narration of the terror of the imperial gaze transforming suddenly
into the largely aural experience of white listeners hearing black slave
resistance.
A few years later, the black abolitionist novelist Martin R. Delany
referred explicitly to the connection between black musical performance
and American Revolution in the “New Orleans” chapter of Blake, or,
The Huts of America. He portrayed the city’s exhibitions, festivals, balls,
and gatherings as a breeding ground for revolt:

This was the evening of the day of Mardi Gras, and from long-established and
time-honored custom, the celebration which commenced in the morning was now
being consummated by games, shows, exhibitions, theatrical performances, festi-
vals, masquerade balls, and numerous entertainments and gatherings in the
evening. It was on this account that the Negroes had been allowed such unlimited
privileges this evening.69

Delany’s description begins neutrally enough, almost like an exotic travel

account meant to amuse middle-class white Northeastern readers. Indeed,
a minstrel-like performer, speaking in dialect and “shuffling about over the
floor” soon appears on the scene and, “stamping and singing at the top

67
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2008), 40.
68
Melville, Benito Cereno, 77.
69
Martin R. Delany, Blake, or, The Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 1970), 98.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 130 bonnie gord on

of his voice,” belts out a minstrel song, complete with references to

“Old master.” But this particular minstrel performance is not designed
to reassure white audiences, for the singer is in fact the leader of
an imminent slave revolution, and he calls the slaves to arms with his
song – which turns out to celebrate, rather than mourn the death of
“Old master”:
Come all my brethren, let us take a rest,
While the moon shines bright and clear;
Old master died and left us all at last,
And has gone at the bar to appear!
Old master’s dead and lying in his grave;
And our blood will now cease to flow;
He will no more tramp on the neck of the slave,
For he’s gone where slaveholders go!
Hang up the shovel and the hoe – o – o – o!
I don’t care whether I work or no!70

In Delany’s rendering, this Louisiana minstrel scene yields not the canned
music of white complacency, but what he calls the “terrible accents”
of black revolution: “Insurrection! Insurrection! Death to every white!”
Minstrel song becomes revolutionary “noise,” but the reader doesn’t hear
it immediately and instead must learn to “hear” the difference between
white complacency and black revolution.

Conclusion

As others have noted, the Haitian Revolution, which ultimately led

Napoleon to sell Louisiana to Jefferson for barely four cents an acre,
racialized the age of revolutions and called into question the very notion
of a slaveholding republic. The Louisiana Purchase depended on the
actions of a revolutionary movement in Haiti and on violent events that
cost 50,000 French troops their lives, and probably twice as many Saint
Dominguans.71 As Jefferson’s multiple justifications for slavery demon-
strate, slavery as an institution in the United States depended on the

70
Delany, Blake, or, The Huts of America, 99. See also Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface
Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 236.
71
See James, The Black Jacobins; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution; and Geggus,
The Impact of the Haitian Revolution.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 131

assumption that enslaved Africans and their descendants could not

imagine or demand freedom. In effect, they were seen as subhuman.
The Haitian Revolution loomed large for contemporary African slaves,
as it would later in the emergence of a particularly African American
culture. W. E. B. Du Bois explained in 1896:
The role which the great Negro Toussaint, called L’Ouverture, played in the history
of the United States has seldom been fully appreciated. Representing the age of
revolution in America, he rose to leadership through a bloody terror, which
contrived a Negro “problem” for the Western Hemisphere, intensified and defined
the anti-slavery movement, became one of the causes, and probably the prime one,
which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song, and finally, through the inter-
working of all these effects, rendered more certain the final prohibition of the
slave-trade by the United States in 1807.72

The refugees from Haiti also brought with them West African cultural
elements, including music, and the attempts to silence that culture –
literally and figuratively, diachronically and synchronically – remind us
that sound was and is heavily racialized. The drums and incantations that
the migrants were imagined to bring were immediately associated at the
time with black noise and resistance. These sounds were thus assimilated
into a larger process of racializing sound as white or black.
The most important point in this essay, then, is the reminder that
sound is not all about the visual, and that silence and quiet are not the
same thing. Jefferson’s silence on the issue of African American musick-
ing does not mean that it did not resound in his world. In Jefferson’s
Virginia, this meant that blacks were almost always denied the potential
to be musical and that their sounds were often associated with noise and
disruption. Drums, dancing, and chanting all had associations with
rebellion and with non-Christian practices, which slaveholders worked
to stamp out.
This essay, on the one hand, attempts to listen to the past; to hear
Jefferson’s soundscape and the ways in which it was constructed by race.
But it also stresses that acts of understanding and remembering themselves
always involve sound and aurality. It is not as easy as the familiar formula,
silence equals oppression and voice equals power; but the interplay
between noise and music, as well as of sound and silence, depends on
trying to think through real sound from the past. In other words, it is

72
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America
1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 70.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
 132 bonnie gord on

worth listening to the noise in the silences that supposedly embody

oppression and tuning into sounds, not just ideas about sounds. History
is always an act of silencing as well as envoicing, and part of our job is to
bring on the sounds of the clamorous past. This listening might be a way
to answer Ruth Solie’s call in Musicology and Difference to question the
disciplinary assumptions not so much about what counts as music,
but about what counts as music worthy of study, and thus about who
has the power to interpret, define, and own music.

EBSCOhost - printed on 7/27/2021 2:23 PM via WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use