Speaker explores the domestic side of slavery

By Elisa Glushefski

Published: November 29, 2008

Life as an enslaved domestic worker at Monticello took skill and intense focus, and it is what made the elite life that Thomas Jefferson led possible.

That was the topic of a recent lecture by the African-American research historian at Monticello presented at the Woodbridge campus of Northern Virginia Community College.

"Over the last 100 years of historiography, the domestic life, as it were, has often been dismissed as triv-ial," Leni A. Sorensen said to the roughly 40 people who came to the campus to her speak.

Instead, focus has been primarily on field workers, Sorensen said. But her lecture on the role domestic servants played at Monticello, where Jefferson spent the majority of his adult life, shed light on the lives of those who prepared the elaborate meals that fed residents and guests at Monticello.  At times there could be upwards of 100 guests at a time.

The domestic staff made sure the master's fashion was always current and they did the dirty work at the household, like emptying and cleaning the chamber pots.

"All of these things took effort and knowledge," Sorensen said.

The lecture, "Understanding Skilled Domestic Service at Monticello," was funded by a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and is part of a public history program examining Virginia's history of slavery, according to a news release about the program.

Future programs will have an emphasis on Prince William County, said Dan Lewis, dean of communications and humanities at the Woodbridge campus.

Part of what made life as a servant at Monticello and other estates like it so complex was that multiple tasks had to be choreographed by multiple people so that nothing was left undone.

Sorensen also shared a few hard statistics, like the average life expectancy for a white man (45) and for the average black man (35); and that in 1819 slaves accounted for 44 per-cent of all the wealth in the five major cotton-producing states, eclipsing the value of land.

Following the lecture, Sorensen said she wanted to give the audience a better perspective on the times and what work people were able to accomplish at what is now considered a young age.

Rasheeda Ogburn, 17, and Rebekah Furr, 18, came for the extra credit their English professor offered for attending the lecture, but said they walked away with some new perspective on the topic.

"I learned a lot of stuff I didn't know," said Ogburn, a student at Gar-Field High School with dual enrollment at the community college. "It was very interesting.

"I didn't know about them sending slaves to France. I just really didn't think they cared that much," Ogburn said on learning that James Hemings, the older brother of estate servant Sally Hemings, had accompanied Jefferson to France and apprenticed under French cooks and became a skilled chef.

Sorensen said she wanted the lecture to give a more positive perspective on the work of domestic workers during slavery.

"It wasn't trivial," Sorensen said of their work. "They did it with a great deal of focus."

And, she added, open discussion on the country's past could help promote wider discussion on other atrocities, such as Darfur.