The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (108 page)

4.
TJ to James Madison, Feb. 20, 1784,
Papers
, 6:546.

5.
TJ to Madison, April 22, 1783,
Papers
, 6:262, expressing his desire that Floyd and Madison get together and saying that he "often made it the subject of conversation, more exhortation, with her [Floyd] and was able to convince myself that she possessed every sentiment in your favor which you could wish. But of this no more without your leave." Julian Boyd notes, p. 262 n.1, that this paragraph "was entirely written in cipher" and had to be decoded by the editors.

6.
Brant,
James Madison
, 2:283–87; James Madison to TJ, Aug. 31, 1783,
Papers
, 6:335. A passage in the letter that had referred to Floyd was "heavily scored out by Madison" at a later point. Boyd,
Papers
, 6:335 n. 1. TJ was sympathetic about his friend’s "misadventure which has happened from whatever cause it may have happened" and assured him that "the world still presents the same and many other resources of happiness, and you possess many within yourself." He then counseled, "Firmness of mind and unintermitting occupations will not long leave you in pain."

7.
Jean Edward Smith,
John Marshall: Definer of a Nation
(New York, 1996), 73, 85–86; Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 534–35.

8.
Kierner,
Scandal at Bizarre
, 29; Edith Tunis Sale,
Manors of Virginia in Colonial Times
(Philadelphia, 1909), 122; Jefferson Randolph Anderson, "Tuckahoe and the Tuckahoe Randolphs,"
Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society
35 (1937): 29–59.

9.
Martha Hodes,
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South
(New Haven, 1999).

10.
Thomas R. R. Cobb,
An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery
(Philadelphia and Savannah, 1858), 98–100. There have been many studies of European attitudes toward black women. See, e.g., Jordan,
White over Black
; White,
Ar’n’t I a Woman?
, 27–46, on the "Jezebel" stereotype.

11.
Sloan,
Principle and Interest
, 14–17. On the question of the value of the Wayles fortune, see ibid., 254 n. 15; on the decision to take the Wayles assets, see ibid., 15–16.

12.
Ibid., 16.

13.
TJ to Nicholas Lewis, July 11, 1788,
Papers
, 13:343.

14.
"Critta Hemings," Monticello Research Department, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.

15.
TJ to Nicholas Lewis, April 12, 1792,
Papers
, 23:408.

16.
See Hemings family tree in this book; Lucia Stanton, "Monticello to Main Street: The Hemings Family and Charlottesville,"
Magazine of Albemarle County History
55 (1997): 100.

17.
Melton A. McLaurin,
Celia: A Slave
(Athens, Ga., 1991), provides the most extensive treatment of the legal case that grew out of Celia’s killing of Robert Newsome. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, "Celia’s Case," in
Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History
, ed. Annette Gordon-Reed (New York, 2002), 48–59.

18.
Gordon-Reed, "Celia’s Case," 49.

19.
Ibid., 50.

20.
Ibid., 51–52.

21.
Ibid., 57.

22.
Walter Johnson,
Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999).

1.
TJ to Andre Limozin, May 3, 1789,
Papers
, 16:86.

2.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 246.

3.
Kierner,
Scandal at Bizarre
, 56–57; White,
Ar’n’t I a Woman?
, 85–86, 126.

4.
TJ,
Notes
, in
Writings
, 180.

5.
Stanton,
Free Some Day
, 105.

6.
See White,
Ar’n’t I a Woman?
, 20, Genovese,
Within the Plantation Household
, 172–77. Both White and Genovese make the point that, however white society chose to see them, enslaved women maintained their own sense of themselves as women, developing their own sense of style and understanding about what role they were to play in the society they were forced to live in. See also Stevenson,
Life in Black and White
, 234–37, discussing how "gender socialization from their mothers" taught female slaves how they were to behave as women.

7.
See Michael A. Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
(Chapel Hill, 1998), 1, referring to "Denmark Vesey’s insurrection" as the "ultimate form of resistance." Historians of slavery have, in fact, expanded the definition of what acts can be considered forms of resistance to slavery as it has become clear that counting up actual slave revolts was an unfair and inadequate way to measure enslaved people’s responses to their situation. With respect to women in particular, the headings in the index to White’s
Ar’n’t I a Woman?
(p. 242) tell the story that resistance is defined as "aggressive behavior," "feigning illness," "schemes and excuses," "uses of poison," and "work slow-downs." In his introduction to
Slave Counterpoint
, xxii, Philip Morgan explains the lack of a separate chapter on slave resistance by saying, "In work and in play, in public and in private, violently and quietly, slaves struggled against masters."

8.
White,
Ar’n’t I a Woman?
, 88–89. Infanticide was "atypical." Stevenson,
Life in Black and White
, 244–45, takes the same view: "a few slave mothers went so far as to commit infanticide." See Stephanie M. H. Camp,
Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South
(Chapel Hill, 2004), and Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 542, on the greater prevalence of mothers running away with children.

9.
Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 526.

10.
Thomas Gibbons to Jonathan Drayton, Dec. 20, 1802, William L. Clement Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, copy at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Library. Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 171, 245.

11.
Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 665–66; "An Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves,"
Laws of Virginia
, 1782, chap. 61.

12.
Despite all their talk of their paternalistic attitudes toward their slaves, a wealth of recent scholarship has shown the extremely limited nature of that paternalism as massive numbers of slaves, "members of the family," were sold as the circumstances of their owners obliged. See, e.g., Johnson,
Soul by Soul
; Deyle,
Carry Me Back
; Adam Rothman,
Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

13.
See above, chap. 1. Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks
, a book devoted to tracking and analyzing the process through which Africans became African Americans, stops at 1830 because, by then, "a translation [had] taken place, consistent with the demographic evidence, that delineates the demise of a preponderant African sociocultural matrix and the rise of an African American one in its place." SH died in the 1830s, and her mother, Elizabeth Hemings, lived until 1807, when her youngest daughter was thirty-four years old; both lived their lives almost totally within the African sociocultural matrix Gomez describes. See also Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 459–77; Ira Berlin,
Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 134.

14.
Stevenson,
Life in Black and White
, 233–34; Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 553–55. One configuration of male-female relations that was quite widespread across the continent was the practice of polygamy, in which "wives were generally subordinate to their husbands." John Thornton has noted the "oft repeated assertion that African wealth was measured in wives, in the sense that polygamy was indicative of prestige and that such wives were often in labor forces." John Thornton,
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800
, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1998), 86. Elizabeth Hemings’s mother would likely not have expected to be the sole wife of a man, an understanding that would have given her very different perspectives on her life as a woman, whether positive or negative, from a woman whose culture promoted monogamy. There is an overall sense that in the West and Central African countries from which the majority of American slaves were brought, male dominance was very much the norm, and many slaves carried that attitude with them across the ocean. Of course, African men were not alone in their preference for dominance over females. That can almost be called a universal tendency among males. See also White,
Ar’n’t I a Woman?,
106–18, discussing West African conceptions of motherhood.

15.
Bear,
The Hemings Family
, 9.

16.
Barbara J. Heath,
Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest
(Charlottesville, 1999), 51.

17.
Stanton,
Free Some Day
, 106; Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann Wright, "Bonds of Memory Identity and the Hemings Family," in
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture
, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, 1999), 170–72.

18.
Frederick Douglass,
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
(Hartford, Conn., 1882), 28. On the history of racial classifications, see Peter Wallenstein,
Tell the Court I Love My Wife
(London, 2004); Robinson,
Dangerous Liaisons
, 655. Ariela Gross has cautioned against taking too much stock in "statutes and appellate opinions as evidence of social beliefs about race—for example, ‘one-drop-of-blood’ rules of racial identification as evidence of the growing power of biological racism—[she] found that the legal rule articulated by statute or high court often made little difference at the local level. Ancestry rules did not usually decide actual cases." Ariela Gross, "Beyond Black and White: Cultural Approaches to Race and Slavery,"
Columbia Law Review
101 (Apr. 2001), 654.

19.
For works devoted to the various modes of black activism during the eighteenth century, see, e.g., Benjamin Quarles,
The Negro in the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill, 1961); Robert Colley,
Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia
(Urbana 1973); Sidney Kaplan and Nogrady Kaplan,
The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution,
rev. ed. (Amherst, Mass., 1989); Sylvia R. Frey,
Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age
(Princeton, 1991); Woody Holton,
Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia
(Chapel Hill, 1999).

20.
Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks
, 220.

21.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 245, 246. Hemings’s seeming pride that his grandmother was a full-blooded African was not unusual. Michael Gomez endorses John W. Blassingame’s findings on how many enslaved men and women viewed Africans with respect. See Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks
, 191, 236, referencing Blassingame’s
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
(New York, 1972), 39–42.