Jupiter (Evans)

An enslaved boy was born at Shadwell, Peter Jefferson's plantation in central Virginia, in or near 1743 — the same year as the planter family's son Thomas. The boy was given the name Jupiter, in the Roman-classical naming convention the architecture's planter class operated as one of its mechanisms for converting the enslaved into objects of cultural reference within the household register's classical-allusion grammar. He is identified in the scholarship as Jupiter Evans to distinguish him from another enslaved man named Jupiter who would later be at Monticello. He was assigned, at the moment of his birth or shortly after, as the personal attendant — the body servant, in the household register's vocabulary — of the planter family's son.

The assignment was not a decision made by either child. The assignment was the architecture's ordinary operation in the propertied Virginia household of the period. A male child of the planter family was attended from his earliest years by an enslaved boy of approximately the same age, drawn from the household's enslaved population, who would serve as the planter child's daily companion in the specific juridical relation the architecture's household theology specified — the planter child as the future master, the enslaved child as the future servant whose presence at the master's elbow was a constitutive feature of the master's daily life from the master's earliest memory.

Jupiter Evans was at Thomas Jefferson's elbow continuously from infancy. He accompanied Jefferson to the College of William and Mary in 1760 as Jefferson's body servant. He attended Jefferson during Jefferson's reading of law in Williamsburg under George Wythe. He served as Jefferson's personal attendant, manservant, and coachman through the early decades of Jefferson's adult life. He handled Jefferson's daily personal needs — clothing, grooming, the saddling of horses, the driving of carriages, the management of Jefferson's traveling arrangements when Jefferson moved between Monticello and Williamsburg and the various other locations of his political and legal practice. He died in 1800 after taking a medication administered by another enslaved man practicing as a healer. Jefferson was fifty-seven when Jupiter Evans died. Jupiter Evans had been at Jefferson's elbow for the entirety of Jefferson's life up to that point.

The relationship was the longest sustained relationship Jefferson had with another adult outside his immediate kin. It exceeded in duration his marriage to Martha (which lasted from 1772 until her death in 1782, ten years), his relationship with Sally Hemings (which began around 1789 and continued until his death in 1826, about thirty-seven years), his friendships with John Adams (interrupted by their political conflict), and his political partnership with James Madison (which operated across approximately four decades but in different forms across different periods). The architecture had constituted this longest relationship as a property relation. The architecture had performed the constitution before Jefferson was capable of consenting to it or to anything else. Jefferson lived inside the constitution from his birth through Jupiter Evans's death.

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The body-servant practice was not unique to the Jefferson household. The practice was the architecture's standard household operation across the propertied Virginia planter class. The practice's structural function was the production of the planter child's formation in the architecture's relations from the earliest possible moment of the planter child's life. The practice performs four distinct theological operations.

The first operation is the planter child's pre-cognitive installation in the property relation. The planter child experienced the property relation as natural before the planter child was capable of recognizing it as a relation at all. By the time the planter child was old enough to think about the relationship, the relationship had been the constant of his entire experienced life. The enslaved child's presence was as familiar as the nursery, the family meals, the household servants more generally, the architecture of the plantation house itself. The planter child did not learn that he held property in another person; he experienced the holding as the unmarked default of his existence, with the relation in place before his earliest memories formed.

This pre-cognitive installation is structurally important to the architecture's reproduction across generations.

A relation experienced as natural from infancy is far more resistant to subsequent moral examination than a relation introduced later in life. The architecture is not installed in the child through doctrine the child learns; the architecture is installed in the child through the body's somatic and emotional formation in relations the doctrine will later articulate. By the time the doctrine arrives — in the schoolroom, in the law office, in the moral philosophy curriculum at William and Mary — the doctrine articulates what the body has already received as the unmarked default of existence. The articulation does not produce the conviction; the articulation provides the vocabulary for what the formation has already produced.

The second operation is the simultaneous installation in the enslaved child. The enslaved child was formed in the architecture's relations from the same earliest moment. The enslaved child's experience of the planter child was the experience of the future master from the period when neither child had any choice about the configuration. The enslaved child learned what was expected of him in the relation through years of daily practice before he was old enough to articulate the practice's character. By adolescence, the enslaved child had absorbed the operating routines, the deferential vocabulary, the somatic calibration of how to be in the planter child's presence, the management of the planter child's moods and demands. The architecture's training was complete before the enslaved child reached the age at which formal training in adult tasks would begin. The architecture had used the years of childhood, when the planter family's attention to the relation was relaxed, to produce the formation that the architecture's adult operations would subsequently rely on.

The third operation is the relation's installation as a relation between particular persons rather than between abstract categories. Jefferson did not hold the enslaved population in the abstract; he held Jupiter Evans, a specific person whose specific characteristics and history were known to Jefferson from infancy. This particularity was structurally important to the architecture's operation. The architecture's apologetics — the literature of the good master, the faithful servant, the family of the household — operated through the particularity of relations like Jefferson's relation with Jupiter Evans, presenting the architecture's operation as personal connection rather than as the abstract domination it constitutively was.

The particularity functions as the architecture's mechanism for occluding its own structural character. The good master who knew his servant's family, who attended his servant's illnesses, who provided for his servant in old age, was the architecture's preferred self-presentation, and the body-servant relation produced exactly this presentation through the longevity and personal character of the relation. The presentation is a forgery in the structural sense. The relation was always a property relation, and the property relation was always the architecture's foundational fact, regardless of whatever personal warmth or familiarity the daily operation of the relation produced. The personal warmth was the architecture's signature occlusion. The personal warmth IS what made the architecture's apologetic register possible.

The fourth operation is the somatic and emotional formation that the architecture's adult operations require. The planter child who grew up with an enslaved attendant developed habits of being attended to, habits of issuing instructions to be carried out, habits of having his physical needs anticipated and met, habits of moving through space with another body in close proximity managing the practical operations of his existence. These habits were the somatic formation of the master. They were not natural; they were produced by the architecture's daily operation. The propertied white male householder who emerged from this formation into adult life carried the formation in his body. The expectations of how the world would arrange itself around him, the comfort of having his needs met without his needing to attend to their meeting, the assumption that other persons existed in proximity to him for the management of his life — all of these were embedded in his physical formation by years of having an enslaved attendant of the same age operating in this role. The architecture had produced the master's body as well as the master's mind, and the master's body would carry the architecture's commitments at registers far below conscious articulation throughout the master's adult life.

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The structural lock onto the founding moment.

The man who wrote all men are created equal had been formed, from infancy, in a daily relation with another human being whom the architecture had assigned to him as property. The assignment was the architecture's operation, performed before Jefferson was capable of consenting to it or to anything else. The relation was the unmarked default of Jefferson's existence from his earliest memories. The vocabulary of all men, when Jefferson deployed it at thirty-three, did not include Jupiter Evans, and the exclusion was not a contradiction Jefferson was failing to perceive. The exclusion was the architecture's specification of the term men, embedded in Jefferson's somatic and emotional formation since infancy, operating beneath any conscious deliberation Jefferson could have brought to bear on the question.

Jefferson did not have to decide that all men excluded Jupiter Evans. The architecture had decided this for him before he was old enough to think. The architecture had produced his formation in such a way that the exclusion was the unmarked default, and the affirmative inclusion of Jupiter Evans in the term men would have required Jefferson to undo the formation that the architecture had built into him from his birth. Some persons formed in this architecture did undo it, in various partial ways, across various stages of their lives. Many did not. Jefferson did not. Jefferson articulated the architecture's vocabulary at continental scale because the architecture had produced him to do so, and the production began at his birth with the assignment of Jupiter Evans to his cradle.

This is what the law of sin and death names at the level of the personal life. The architecture installs itself into the body of the planter child before the child is capable of perceiving the installation. The installation produces the formation that the architecture's adult operations require. The adult operations are then performed, under the formation's authority, with the formation experienced as the unmarked default of the world. The architecture's mechanism for self-reproduction across generations is precisely this installation at infancy, and the propertied white male householder class of Virginia operated the installation as one of its constitutive practices. Jefferson was the architecture's product as much as the architecture's articulator. The articulation he produced at continental scale was the formation he had received at infancy, scaled up to the dimension the constitutional moment required.

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This is what the forge / forgery distinction specifies at the level of the architecture's individual operators. The forgery does not only produce its objects; the forgery produces the figures who will continue producing its objects. Jefferson is what the architecture's forgery produces in Jefferson. The body-servant assignment is the first operation in the production. The years of household-register formation are the daily forging. The articulate adult who deploys the universal-rights vocabulary is the configuration's surface output, with the configuration itself operating below the level the articulation can reach.

The articulation cannot reach the configuration because the articulation IS the configuration's mature surface output. The vocabulary of liberty, consent, rights, self-government — the vocabulary's internal architecture specifies its own jurisdictional limits, and the jurisdictional limits are the architecture's specifications, embedded in Jefferson's somatic and emotional formation since infancy, operating beneath the articulation as the conditions of the articulation's possibility. Jefferson is not in tension with the architecture's commitments. Jefferson is the architecture's commitments operating at continental scale through the figure the architecture's body-servant practice produced.

The forgery's continued operation requires the production of figures formed in this way. The figures' continued production requires the apparatus's continued operation. The cycle is the architecture's intergenerational reproduction at the level of the individual operator's formation. The architecture cannot be ended by the figures the architecture produces, because the figures the architecture produces ARE the architecture's commitments operating in articulate form. The articulation is downstream of the formation; the formation is downstream of the apparatus; the apparatus is the architecture's continuous installation across generations.