When Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana, he acquired a soundscape that resounded with echoes of the Haitian Revolution. As Jefferson’s writings demonstrate, he experienced the Revolution as a threatening event that challenged his understanding of blacks as incapable of self-governance, resistance, and music-making. New Orleans represented everything Jefferson feared. It was a place of political alternatives, where freed blacks comprised a substantial portion of the population and where a vibrant African-American music culture existed, despite legal proscriptions. In 1785, when Jefferson wrote
Notes on the State of Virginia, dances in Congo Square had already created a space for music of all kinds. And in 1809, New Orleans experienced an influx of new music-making, with the arrival of 9000 Caribbean refugees. They doubled the city’s population and brought with them their Creole language, African dances, European opera, and a music culture in which freed and enslaved blacks interacted with whites in a way that Virginia never saw. Jefferson was aware of this, and, in a suggestive coincidence, in 1809 he had over 100 glass plates installed in the main house at Monticello—physically blocking off the multi-racial soundscape of his own plantation.
This paper uses the entangled soundscapes of Jefferson’s America to strengthen the case for incorporating sound and musical aesthetics into the early history of race. European- and African-derived musics became racialized as “white” and “black,” respectively, and they were integral to the discourses supporting American racial hierarchies and chattel slavery. Colonial Americans like Jefferson embraced Europe-derived musics just as they were becoming racialized as white, a cultural identification that responded directly to their position as Euro-settlers in a multi-racial slave society. As they took on the task of nation building, they did so partly by marking themselves as musically metropolitan, in contrast with enslaved and racialized populations near and far.
