Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (22 page)
Read Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Online
Authors: Henry Wiencek
Hemmings began doing productive work for Jefferson when he was fourteen, but he was thirty-four before he drew a paycheck. Jefferson's records usually characterize payments to Hemmings as “a gratuity” or “a donation,” but in one entry he admits that he gave Hemmings one month's pay for a year of workâ“the wages of one month in the year which I allow him as an encouragement.”
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Along with “encouraging” Hemmings with literacy, training, satisfying work, and payments, there was also a diminishment of the man through a careful calibration of recognition.
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Thus did Jefferson receive the services of a top cabinetmaker for $20 a year plus food. What did slavery cost the slave? It is a simple calculation to come up with a dollar figure, but there is a more compelling way of calculating the much larger loss. Imagine for a moment that John Hemmings was white and free; what would his services have earned him on the open market? When he was doing the fine woodwork at Poplar Forestâwhich a Monticello curator has called “incredible”âthe white carpenter John Perry was doing the lesser tasks like structural work and laying a floor. Hemmings was the far better craftsman, but Perry was paid well in the marketplace open to whites: “His work on residential buildings and churches in Albemarle and surrounding counties enabled him to purchase large amounts of land, part of which he sold in 1817 toâ¦the University of Virginia. A condition of the sale was that he would have carpentry and joinery contracts.” Another Monticello joiner, James Oldham, earned enough money to open a public house.
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John Hemmings's three older half brothers, Martin, Robert, and James, enjoyed the quasi-freedom to travel around Virginia on their own and earn money off the plantation. (The average Monticello slave needed a written pass from an overseer just to attend church off the plantation.
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) They had access to cash and many opportunities to flee.
Robert Hemings went to Annapolis with Jefferson in 1783 and had two months of tonsorial training there under a French master barber.
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He also journeyed with Jefferson to Boston the following year when Jefferson took ship for France. With cash in hand and three of his master's horses in his care, Hemings then made his way back to the land of slavery.
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At that time Jefferson may or may not have known that Robert Hemings and an enslaved woman named Doll were in a relationship that would culminate in their marriage. Jefferson wrote to an acquaintance in 1790 that “if you know anything of Bob,” tell him to report to Monticello; “I suppose him to be in the neighborhood of Fredericksbg.”
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That was where Hemings had met and married Doll, who later moved to Richmond with her owner, Dr. George Stras.
With a wife and child in Richmond, Robert decided in 1794 to extract himself from Monticello with the aid of Dr. Stras. The negotiation that ensued left Jefferson feeling angry and cheated, complaining that Stras had “debauched him from me.” He convinced himself that Robert's new family had nothing to do with his request to leave Monticello; rather, a conniving outsider had simply offered him a better deal. But it was his own family tie that may explain Jefferson's annoyance. Robert's kinship to Jefferson gave him leverage over his master. Kinship entangled Jefferson in a connection he could not break or evade, subverted his control of a prized servant, and breached the wall of slavery.
Despite his anger, Jefferson relented and on Christmas Eve 1794 wrote in his account book, “Executed a deed of emancipation for Bob, by the name of Robert Hemmings. He has been valued at £60.”
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Dr. Stras advanced Robert the purchase price, which was paid to Jefferson, securing Robert's release from Monticello. Robert worked for the doctor until 1799 to pay off the debt.
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Robert knew he was leaving Monticello under the cloud of Jefferson's disapproval. For all practical and legal purposes he was free from Jefferson for good, but he tried to repair the rupture with his kinsman as soon as he could. Right after his release, he saw Jefferson's daughter Martha in Richmond and took the opportunity to beg forgiveness. Martha wrote to her father in January 1795:
I saw Bob frequently while in Richmond he expressed great uneasiness at having quitted you in the manner he did and repeatedly declared that he would never have left
you
to live with any person but his wife. He appeared to be so much affected at having
deserved
your anger that I could not refuse my intercession when so warmly solicited towards obtaining your forgiveness. The poor creature seems so deeply impressed with a sense of his ingratitude as to be rendered quite unhappy by it but he could not prevail upon himself to give up his wife and child.
Martha's sympathy for Robert may have arisen from their kinship; after all, he was her half uncle.
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After working off his indenture to Dr. Stras, Robert became fully independent and acquitted himself in a manner that confounded Jefferson's theory that freeing slaves was like abandoning children. By 1799 he was listed on Richmond's tax rolls as a property owner. Three years later he resided on a half-acre lot he purchased with the income from a livery stable he owned. He may have run a small freight-hauling operation. The Monticello family never lost touch with him. He handled a cash transaction for Jefferson in Richmond and sent a shipment of oysters to Monticello in 1809.
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A little more than a year after Robert left Monticello, his brother James departed as wellâanother great loss for Jefferson, who had invested substantially in training him. As early as 1784, Jefferson was thinking of hiring a French chef in Annapolis to come to Monticello to train a slave. But when he was dispatched to Paris as U.S. minister, he had a better idea. He took nineteen-year-old James with him “for the particular purpose of learning French cookery,” arranging apprenticeships with Parisian caterers and cooks, including a pâtissier.
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Soon Hemings was preparing meals for distinguished visitors at Jefferson's Paris residence. All did not go smoothly, however. Hemings had a violent dispute over a bill with his French-language tutor, beating and kicking the manâan outburst that may have resulted from drinking, since Hemings later showed signs of alcoholism.
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Despite being able to claim freedom under French law, Hemings returned to the United States.
James had other opportunities to escape. He worked for Jefferson in Philadelphia, which had a large free black community (later in the 1790s two of George Washington's household slaves escaped from him in Philadelphia). As part of his household duties James got to know a former slave of James Madison's who was living as a free man with his wife, who worked for Jefferson as a washerwoman.
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A year later Jefferson brought Hemings along when he toured New York state with Madison. At New York City, Jefferson boarded a boat for Poughkeepsie, giving Hemings expense money to bring his phaeton and horse to Poughkeepsie by land. Hemings could have escaped then and there.
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Jefferson fully expected that this expensively trained slave would become chef for life at Monticello, but in 1793, while serving his master in Philadelphia when Jefferson was secretary of state, Hemings decided he wanted to go off on his own. He struck a deal with Jefferson that he could go free after training his brother Peter as his replacement. The document Jefferson drew up to seal the arrangement seems calculated to instill some guilt: “Having been at great expense in having James Hemings taught the art of cookery, disiring to befriend
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him, and to require from him as little in return as possible, I do hereby promise and declare” to set James free if he will train his own replacement. It took James more than two years to complete Peter's training to Jefferson's satisfaction, whereupon Jefferson drew up the manumission document “to be produced when & where it may be necessary.” He also gave his freed servant $30 for travel expenses to Philadelphia. A few months later Jefferson and Hemings saw each other there, and Jefferson wrote, with evident concern: “James is returned to this place, and is not given up to drink as I had been informed. He tells me his next trip will be to Spain. I am afraid his journeys will end in the moon. I have endeavored to persuade him to stay where he is, and lay up money.”
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It seems that Peter Hemings was not as talented in the kitchen as his brother, whom he replaced as Monticello's head chef in 1796, though Jefferson characterized him as a man of “great intelligence and diligence.”
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When Jefferson became president and the quality of White House cuisine was much on his mind, he tried to bring James back rather than entrust the presidential table to Peter. (It is also possible that Jefferson left Peter at Monticello out of respect for his family. There is evidence that Hemings had a wife and family off the plantation.)
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The only creations of Peter's that Jefferson singled out for praise were his muffins.
When Jefferson sent word to James in Baltimore that his services would be welcome at the White House, Hemings begged off, saying he would be uneasy living “among strange servants.” He briefly went back to work for Jefferson at Monticello but was dissatisfied and left, returning to a job at a Baltimore tavern. An accumulation of small bits of evidenceâhis fight in France with the tutor, rumors of drinking, his wandering from place to place, his weak excuse for refusing the White House postâsuggests a growing instability of some kind that in fact culminated in a tragic end. Jefferson heard shocking news from his servants and received written confirmation from an acquaintance: “The report respecting James Hemings having committed an act of suicide is trueâ¦. he had been delirious for some daysâ¦and it was the general opinion that drinking too freely was the cause.”
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The historian Elizabeth Langhorne saw a cautionary moral in the sad fate of James Hemings: “Jefferson's interest in colonization of the blacks, and his increasing conviction that free black and white could not prosper together in the new world may well have taken its strongest impulse from the troubled career and tragic end of his servant James.”
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Such is the heavy symbolic burden borne by America's black men. She did not mention that Jefferson's white French maître d', after leaving Jefferson's service at the White House, also committed suicide. No conclusion as to the impossibility of Frenchmen living in America was drawn from that melancholy demise.
Martin Hemings, Jefferson's butler, left Monticello under very different circumstances. When Jefferson first acquired the Hemingses from the Wayles estate, he did not entirely trust Martin. In 1774 he wrote that he was keeping a count of his bottles of rum “in order to try the fidelity of Martin.”
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As described earlier, Martin proved his loyalty during the Revolution when a detachment of British raiders ascended Monticello Mountain and swarmed about the house and Jefferson barely escaped capture. What happened next became part of the oral tradition of the Jefferson family. His grandchildren Ellen Coolidge and Jeff Randolph shared the story in the 1850s with Jefferson's biographer Henry Randall, who noted in his text that the details of the account “are given on the statements, oral and written, of several members of Mr. Jefferson's family, who repeatedly heard all the particulars from his lips, and from those of other actors on the scene.” Martin Hemings defied a British soldier who shoved a pistol to his chest and demanded to know where Jefferson had gone. At the risk of death, Martin refused to betray his master.
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The oral history of the Jefferson family preserved an image of Martin's character that does not fit the stereotype of loyal, contented slave. He was “one of those sullen and almost fierce natures, which will love and serve
one
, if worthy of it, with a devotion ready to defy anythingâbut which will love or serve but one.” This portrait suggests a unique reciprocity between slave and master. Martin accepted enslavement only from a master who was worthy, and the judgment of worthiness was Martin'sâ“he served any other person with reluctance, and received orders from any other quarter with scarcely concealed anger.” His relationship to Jefferson imparted a status he would yield to no other; as Jefferson's body servant, he “would suffer no fellow-servant to do the least office for his master; he watched his glance and anticipated his wants.”
When Jefferson was in France in 1786, Martin found himself another temporary master of sufficiently high status to be worthy of his service. He hired himself out as an attendant to Jefferson's neighbor James Monroe, apparently without presenting any written authorization from his owner, which was customary. Monroe hired Hemings on the latter's assurance that “he was at liberty to engage for himself.” Monroe took Hemings at his word, and Martin pocketed extra earnings instead of idling at Monticello for nothing. (In contrast, Jefferson hired Jupiter out for £25 a year; as trusted and valued as he was, Jupiter did not have the status of a Hemings.) Martin became accustomed to going around Virginia as he pleased when his master was not in residence. Jefferson countenanced Martin's independence as long as his servant returned to the mountaintop when needed. From New York, Jefferson wrote to his daughter Martha in 1790, “I must trouble you to give notice to Martin to be at Monticello by the 1st. of September that he may have things prepared.” And when he was leaving Philadelphia for Monticello in 1792, Jefferson wrote to his tobacco agent, Daniel Hylton, “If you should know any thing of my servants Martin or Bob, and could give them notice to be at Monticello by the 20th. I should be obliged to you.”
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