The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (13 page)

At the same time Jefferson was very verbal, a stereotypically feminine attribute. People noticed his facility with language very early in his career, and that talent formed a central core of how people perceived him. He adored words—reading them, exploring their meaning, writing them, and saying them. Although public speaking was not at all his strong suit, his face-to-face conversation impressed with the clarity of his presentation when it did not oppress, for once he became comfortable with people in social settings, he verged, at least in some situations, on chattiness. John Quincy Adams, who dined with him at the President’s House during the early 1800s, showed evidence of being worn down by Jefferson’s unbidden lectures on wine or on whatever the topic of the evening.

Architecture was Jefferson’s “delight,” but “music,” he said, was “the favorite passion of [his] soul.” He eagerly listened to it, played it, and sang. Those in daily contact with him at Monticello said that he sang very well, and did so as a matter of course, without embarrassment—loudly enough for others to hear him as he worked in his bedroom/study or rode his horse, or for the specific amusement of others. One of his overseers remembered that when he was not “talking” he was singing aloud or humming to himself. He played the violin and cello, but he especially liked the violin, practicing for hours at a time as a young man. Though very competent, he was not a natural; he could not play by ear like Patrick Henry, whom he seemed to envy for that ability. The love of music bound him to his future bride, described as accomplished on the pianoforte. Like his love and admiration for woodworking, this other deep passion he passed along to his sons, all of whom played the violin. The youngest, Eston, who also played the piano, was apparently the most talented, for he eventually made a very good living as a professional musician.
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When he began to seriously court Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson was in his late twenties and just beginning the practice of law. On entering the House of Burgesses in 1769, he became an official member of Virginia’s leadership class, though he was already well known in Williamsburg, having attended the College of William and Mary, studied law with one of the town’s most illustrious figures, George Wythe, and endeared himself to the town’s leading figures. The overlapping network among lawyers at Virginia’s General Court and men associated with William and Mary was his likely route to Martha’s door, for business blended into social life in myriad ways, pulling members of Virginia’s elite into a near-seamless web of relationships. Jefferson began practicing in Virginia’s General Court in 1767 and very likely came into contact with John Wayles then, if not before. He certainly had heard of him. The Wayles-Blair-Chiswell contretemps had been fodder for the
Virginia Gazette
for weeks during 1766, and Jefferson avidly read that paper. Perhaps the earliest written connection between the two men was the deed settling property among the daughters of Wayles’s benefactor, Philip Ludwell—Hannah (married to William Lee, who also received property in the transaction) and Lucy Ludwell Paradise and her husband, John. John Wayles, as one of the original executors of the Ludwell estate, and designated guardian of the sisters, helped prepare this later deed, dated November 6, 1770. The witness was none other than Thomas Jefferson.
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We are unlikely ever to learn precisely how Jefferson came to be in that group of men dealing with Ludwell’s interests, but one can play connect the dots. One of John Wayles’s coexecutors of the original Ludwell will, Benjamin Waller, formed a bridge between Jefferson’s pre-and post-Wayles lives. Waller, who along with John Wayles helped look after Ludwell’s interests, had a busy practice before the court and acted as a lawyer with John Wayles selling land and slaves. Most important of all for the Jefferson connection, he also had taught law to George Wythe, Jefferson’s own law professor and mentor. Wythe and Waller remained extremely close friends until Waller’s death in the 1780s. It is inconceivable that Wythe did not introduce his own beloved teacher to his beloved pupil, and extol the virtues of the one to the other. Jefferson’s records show that he knew of Waller from his earliest days as an attorney. Wayles and Jefferson had another Ludwell family interest in common: both men were visiting Ludwell’s Green Spring in the late 1760s. Wayles, of course, went there to look after Ludwell’s business before and after his death in 1767. Jefferson visited there in 1768, recording the tip he gave to a servant in the household. Green Spring’s landscape evidently impressed him, for in the early 1770s he used plants received from the orchards and gardens there for his own grounds at Monticello.
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The young man who witnessed the actions of the Ludwell executors in 1770 had waited a long time (for his day) to get married, but he was still ahead of his father, who married at thirty-one his nineteen-year-old bride. False starts had brought him much frustration, and he was beyond ready to make a match. Although he had just suffered the devastating blow of losing his home at Shadwell,
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he had many reasons to think he had much to offer John Wayles’s oldest daughter, including the prospect of a new home that he had already started building for himself on a mountain not far from his birthplace. Martha, the daughter of a very wealthy man, had much to offer him. Contemporaries described her as an attractive and personable woman, and Jefferson seems to have loved her deeply. One must be careful, however, because in those days marriage, particularly among the upper classes, had as much to do with property and social position as with being in love. Or, one might say that being upper class, having property, and social position were attributes that made a person lovable. Had Thomas encountered Martha as the beautiful and charming daughter of the blacksmith who shod his horses or, for that matter, as “the daughter of a servant boy” who had remained a servant, he might have loved her, but it is unlikely that he would have married her. It was not uncommon, or at all problematic, for ambitious men to seek advancement by “marrying up.” Both Peter Jefferson and John Wayles had done it. Peter Jefferson, however, had never been a servant and—as far as we know—had never been referred to in a public forum as “ill bred,” so he did not have as far “up” to go.

Thomas was not the first young man to have fallen in love with Martha. She was a widow when she met him, having married Bathurst Skelton in 1766, when she was eighteen years old. The couple had one son, John, the following year, and Skelton died in 1768. Martha, a young widow, returned to her father’s house with her young son. More sorrow followed. Jack Skelton died in 1771.
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Almost unthinkable to modern observers, these types of tragedies happened frequently in her time. Children of all classes and races often died, young people perished of diseases that in our time could easily be cured, and women died in childbirth. Martha Wayles Skelton, however, seems to have suffered more than her share of losses—her mother, two stepmothers, her husband, and her child had all died by the time she was twenty-three years old. Against this backdrop of pain and loss, her acceptance of her father’s mistress and their children seems understandable. Life was simply too hard and unpredictable, connections to loved ones were too fragile, for her to burn bridges carrying any supply of comfort, familiarity, and stability.

Between the years of Martha’s husband’s death and her marriage to Thomas Jefferson, Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings had three more children, bringing the total number to five. Their last son, Peter, arrived during the year that Jefferson began courting Martha. One would love to know his initial reaction to her “bright”-skinned young brothers and sisters. As a resident in a slave society—and an intelligent and observant man—Jefferson knew that race mixing between planters and their enslaved women occurred. He followed his society’s preferred method of responding to it: look the other way and take great care not to incorporate this activity into the tacitly agreed-upon narrative of Virginia life. He would never have publicly acknowledged, or left for posterity, any suspicions about his father-in-law—not even to refute them. Such matters were never to become part of a family’s written legacy.
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During the very year Martha Skelton came into his life, Jefferson served pro bono as a lawyer for a mixed-race man, Samuel Howell, who brought suit to be freed from indentured servitude. Jefferson appeared against his mentor and law teacher George Wythe. As punishment for having a child out of wedlock by a black man, Howell’s white grandmother had been fined and her child (Howell’s mother) was supposed to be bound out for service for thirty-one years. Howell was born during the time of his mother’s decreed service; this was an event that legislators knew would be common because the odds were very great that a woman in that era would have children before she reached the age of thirty-one. Because of
partus sequitur ventrem
, a form of servitude that tracked slavery could continue indefinitely in one family line so long as daughters were born who had children before they reached the end of their terms.

Howell sued his master to gain his freedom. Jefferson’s brief in
Howell v. Netherland
shows that he worked with extreme diligence on the matter, searching for any legal precedents or theories that might aid what was from the start a very weak case. This document is more interesting, however, because it contained his first known public comment on the natural rights of man. Jefferson wrote in his argument for Howell’s freedom, five years before he drafted the Declaration of Independence, “all men are born free [and] everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because it is necessary for his own sustenance.” Jefferson was able to use this idea to much greater effect in 1776, since he had no chance to present it to the Virginia court to obtain Howell’s freedom. The judge cut him off almost in midsentence before he could begin and rendered the decision against Howell. Jefferson lost the case and, as a consolation, gave Howell money—a rare circumstance indeed, a lawyer giving the client money. Howell sought another solution to his problem: he ran away, no doubt aided by the money given to him by his defeated lawyer.
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Jefferson’s brief in the case contained intriguing language in light of circumstances at the Forest and as they would be at Monticello. When analyzing the purpose of laws penalizing white women for engaging in sex across the color line, Jefferson explained that these strictures were to “deter women from the confusion of species which the legislature seems to have considered an evil.”
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The legislature
seems to have considered an evil
? This is very curious language for a man who took great care with words, because it suggests that he was making light of the legislative judgment that sex across the color line was inherently evil or even that it was ever an evil at all. Jefferson’s wording, while acting as a lawyer and trying to put his client in as sympathetic a light as possible, was a bit risky. His hint of equivocation on the substance of the legislative judgment on this point might have offended the justices as much as making them inclined to grant his client’s application. Certainly once he became a famous public man with great responsibilities, he would make other comments about racial mixing that were more in line with those of the legislature that he ever so slightly mocked as a young man. To pause here for a detailed examination of all of Thomas Jefferson’s very human contradictions over his long life would take us far afield. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that the young man who questioned whether “confusion of species” was as dire a threat as lawmakers thought was about to join his life and fortunes to a family that he knew had more than its share of confusion.

Martha Wayles Skelton married Thomas Jefferson on January 1, 1772, at the Forest. Jefferson’s memorandum book entries for the period reveal the festive nature of the event—money paid to the minister, for the marriage license, and to a fiddler. It also marks the first appearance of Elizabeth Hemings in Jefferson’s records—listed as “Betty Hemmins.” Jefferson tipped the household slaves or the servants of his hosts. Hemings received a gratuity that day, most likely for services rendered in connection with the wedding ceremony. There was also a payment to Hemings’s seventeen-year-old son, Martin, the second such reference to him in the memorandum books. In the year before the wedding, Martin received a gratuity during Jefferson’s visit to the Forest to court Martha. This first mention of the Hemings family in Jefferson’s records foreshadows the ties that bound him to them for decades to come.
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Elizabeth Hemings was thirty-seven years old the day Martha married. Her older children—Mary, Martin, Betty, and Nancy—were nineteen, seventeen, thirteen, and eleven years old, respectively. Her children with the father of the bride—Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, and Peter—were ten, seven, five, three, and two. Over the course of the next five years, three more children arrived—her last child with John Wayles, a daughter Sarah, called Sally, and the two children she bore after age forty, John and Lucy. Of these final three, only Sally and John lived to adulthood, and they, of all members of the family, became most closely associated with the man Martha married on that winter day. The laws of marriage united the Wayleses and Jeffersons. The laws of property and slavery brought Elizabeth Hemings and all of her children, present and future, into that union.

The Dawn of Revolution

At the dawn of the 1770s Elizabeth Hemings was one of half a million people of African descent in what was still British North America. Although they represented 20 percent of the entire population of the thirteen colonies, the vast majority of black people were enslaved in the South—most of them concentrated in Hemings’s Virginia and in South Carolina. In the preceding decade, tensions between London and the American colonists had risen to the surface as colonial authorities began to alter the nature of their relationship to the American colonies, issuing proclamations that limited westward expansion in deference to Native American tribes, instituting various tax provisions designed to pay for the French and Indian War and the administrative costs of maintaining the colonies, and enacting and enforcing trade policies that benefited British merchants at the expense of American producers.
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