Monticello – Bidding adieu to the nation's capital, I head west on 66 past Manassas battlefield, then down Rte. 29, formerly the old Seminole trail that runs south through Charlottesville. I was hoping to make it in time to visit Jefferson's house at Monticello, which I last visited a decade ago. Among those making their way down this same road 200 years ago to visit the great man was one of my favorite characters from the Revolutionary era, Constantin François Volney, whose career is freshly evoked in a wonderful book by my friend Peter Linebaugh (coauthor: Marcus Rediker), The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, recently published by Beacon.
A member of the French Assembly who voted to abolish slavery, Volney published Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires in 1791, republished in English 200 years later by Black Classic Press in Baltimore. Worldwide, Volney was as big a hit as Tom Paine, and more radical. In a year his Ruins had been translated into German, English and Welsh. William Blake pored over it. The United Irishmen distributed a chapter from it and by 1797 in Bahia, Brazil, it was in the hands of a mulatto amidst the 1797 conspiracy of whites, browns and blacks.
Volney opposed nationalism, the division of classes and the oppression of women ("the King sleeps or smokes his pipe while his wife and daughters perform all the drudgery of the house"). Like Paine he saw a new age dawning across the Atlantic: "Turning towards the west...a cry of liberty, proceeding from far distant shores, resounds on the ancient continent."
In 1794, amid the rampages of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety, the guillotine wasn't far from Volney's neck. He landed in prison but was released on 9 Thermidor, same day as Paine, and soon sailed to America, spending the winter of 1795-'96 in Philadelphia, across from the African church, which was crowded with refugees from the revolution in Haiti. Then he headed down to Monticello for a visit with Jefferson, later recording his impressions:
"After dinner the master [Jefferson] and I went to see the slaves plant peas. Their bodies dirty brown rather than black, their dirty rags, their miserable, hideous half-nakedness, these haggard figures, this secretive anxious air, the hateful timorous looks, altogether seized me with an initial sentiment of terror and sadness that I ought to hide my face from. Their indolence in turning up the ground with the hoe was extreme. The master took a whip to frighten them, and soon ensued a comic scene. Placed in the middle of the gang, he menaced, and turned far and wide (on all sides) turning around. Now, as he turned his face, one by one, the blacks changed attitude: those whom he looked at directly worked the best, those whom he half saw worked least, and those he didn't see at all, ceased working altogether; and if he made an about-face, the hoe was raised to view, but otherwise slept behind his back."
[Full text: http://www.nypress.com/content.cfm?content_id=3899]
Carl
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