The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (49 page)

As far as young Sally Hemings knew, the link between any trace of blackness and an assured diminished life might continue into the indefinite future. There was nothing on the horizon visible to her in France to suggest that matters would change in her lifetime or that of her children. She could not likely have foreseen that there would come a day when the words “black” and “power” or “black” and “beautiful” would flow naturally together and have a positive meaning and purpose that could direct the course of African American life. Under the circumstances of Hemings’s life, given her society and her family history, what type of man would be most able to end slavery for her children along with all the problems associated with being a person with black skin in America? If not Thomas Jefferson, who? She may have thought him as good a white man as any other, perhaps even better in some ways. That was a judgment to ponder.

Calculating the Odds

Contingencies drive the making of history on scales large and small. To speak of the inevitability of any historical event or outcome is to ignore this salient fact. The same can be said of individual lives. Through a series of events, planned and unplanned, Sally Hemings was not in America when she had to think about what Jefferson offered. Unlike the vast majority of her enslaved cohort back in Virginia, freedom was within her grasp, and she ended up using the unique opportunity she possessed, not as an end in itself, but as a starting point for a discussion with the man who wanted to take her home with him. That Jefferson desired that at all, a further contingent element in Hemings’s life, gave her leverage under their particular circumstances. Another man might not have cared enough to try to persuade her or would have dared her (and her brother) to do their worst: take their claim to the Admiralty Court. Hemings’s discussion with Jefferson would have been meaningless if the pair had been in, for example, South Carolina and she had attempted to take her freedom and refuse to return to Virginia unless Jefferson assured her that he was going to provide what she thought would be a good life.

Any psychological influence Jefferson exercised over Hemings and her family was not total. Whatever he was to her back in Virginia, she had the will to challenge him in France—a very bold thing for a sixteen-year-old to try. Her gambit might not have worked on a man with a different personality—another contingency that shaped her life. It mattered greatly that Hemings was talking to Jefferson, a man who abhorred conflict, especially face-to-face. She probably knew this by the time they talked about returning to Virginia. She had had to pay close attention to him all her life, just as other enslaved people had to pay attention to the people who owned them. Living daily under the power of individual men and women, enslaved people could ill afford to see and deal with their owners as if they formed one, undifferentiated monolithic class. Timid men held slaves just as surely as overly aggressive men held them. Some slave owners were extremely intelligent, while others were as dumb as posts. Some preferred to fashion themselves as benevolent, while others were sadistic and reveled in their sadism. The quality of slaves’ lives—if not their very lives—depended upon developing a sophisticated and pragmatic view of slave owners, and of white people in general. They knew how far they could go in exploiting, resisting, or relying upon the variable personal tendencies of both.

Hemings had not only her own observations of Jefferson to draw upon; a wealth of family history supplemented her knowledge. Whether she had had time in her young life to learn this fact about him or not, the truth is that few things could have disturbed the very thin-skinned, possessive, and controlling Jefferson more deeply than having persons in his inner circle take the initiative and express their willingness to remove themselves from it. To have this come from a young female, the kind of person he thought was supposed to be under the control of males, whether they were enslaved or not, was likely doubly upsetting. While Hemings was an item of property with a dollar value that he would have lost had she remained in France, Jefferson spent more money remodeling the various residences he rented in Paris, and later in New York and Philadelphia—investments he knew he was going to walk away from and leave to the landlord—than Hemings was worth to him in strictly monetary terms. This challenge was a far greater threat to his self-esteem and emotions than to his wallet. He had great confidence in his ability to charm and in his capacity to bring people to his side and keep them there. As we will see, he took her brother Robert’s successful bid for freedom personally as if the man’s willed separation from him were a failed connection of some sort, instead of a completely understandable desire for personal autonomy.

Her behavior suggests something of Hemings’s own confidence—or vanity—that she believed she could hold Jefferson to his promises over what would be a very long period. Twenty-one years from 1789 was an eternity for a sixteen-year-old. Other children would extend the years. Then again, Hemings was a young person without the benefit of personal experience to provide a chastening dose of reality about how devastating to her and her children it would be if she turned out to have made the wrong calculation about Jefferson’s character. She had to trust that he understood and valued what she was giving up by coming back to Virginia, and she staked both her and her children’s futures on that critical belief about him.

According to her family story, with nine-year-old Hemings in the room, Jefferson promised his wife, Martha, that he would never marry again. Seven years had passed, and he still had no new wife, a long time by the standards of that day. As Hemings well knew, a Jefferson promise not to remarry was hardly a promise never again to have female companionship in his life. If Hemings thought Jefferson would continue to abide by his pledge, his desire that she return with him and talk of making a life with her made sense. She would be secure in her place at Monticello. No woman not already known to her would have any influence over the course of her life.

As the product of an interracial union, as a resident of a plantation where such unions were common, and as a Virginian, Sally Hemings knew how society at large would view her life at Monticello once she returned from France with Jefferson. Whites would, of course, be disdainful. One can imagine what other enslaved people at Monticello might have thought if they learned of the terms upon which she had given up her chance for freedom; as Michael A. Gomez has shown, the enslaved community tended to respond to their fellow slaves on the basis of how they conducted themselves. If upon her return Hemings presented herself as enemy to fellow blacks, she would be viewed as such. If she was friendly and acknowledged a common link to them, she could be accepted.
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Whatever the outside world felt, Hemings was apparently determined to make the outcome of her life with Jefferson different from the outcome of her mother’s life with John Wayles, who had died and left Hemings and her five siblings to the mercy of his legal white daughter and her husband. Despite Jefferson’s attempts to ameliorate their condition, what seems to have motivated Hemings as she talked with him in 1789 was that she and her siblings were legally enslaved. Freedom was clearly the preferable state, and she wanted substantially more for her offspring than favored treatment under slavery. The historians Dianne Swann Wright and Beverly Gray have said that Hemings wanted to bring her children “out of Egypt,” which in the end is exactly what she did.
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Hemings had other concerns in addition to her children’s future. Jefferson’s promise to treat her well also figured in her decision to return with him. He knew what he had to say to her, and offered her a life as the companion to a wealthy and powerful man whom she knew well and could trust (he said) that he would do what he promised to do: take care of her in a place where she felt comfortable—at Monticello with her family—and provide something she very much desired for her children. He saw himself as offering what he thought most other young women at the time almost certainly wanted, a stable relationship with an acceptable man. What Hemings could have envisioned as a good life, and what Jefferson knew of that, must be measured by the kind of life that was actually possible for her to have. She knew that in Virginia marriage would be a legal impossibility for her, whether she was paired with Thomas Jefferson or anyone else.

The historian Brenda Stevenson has noted the methods that nineteenth-century planters used to promote matrifocal families within slave plantation communities, “routinely identifying the child’s parentage solely with the mother, often denying any acknowledgement of the father’s role—biological, emotional, social, or material”
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—effectively erasing fathers from the lives of their children and diminishing their status as husbands. The extremely patriarchal Jefferson took a different route. He definitely saw enslaved men as the heads of their households, an attitude likely to be well known within the enslaved community. His Farm Book listings of slave households begin with a male’s name, followed by a female’s, and then their children’s. When they do not, as other sources indicate, it was because the father of the children was a white man, and could not be listed as living within the woman’s household, or the women had “abroad” marriages with men who did not live on Jefferson’s farms. Perhaps even more telling about his attitude is that in the separate listing of births during any given year, after he wrote the child’s name, he put the parents’ names next. When the man’s name was included (that is, when he was black and lived on one of Jefferson’s plantations), it was customarily placed first. Writing of intact enslaved families in other documents, he referred to the man first and then “his wife” and children. When Jefferson contemplated blacks’ future outside of slavery, he spoke of black men—not black women—as the prime movers of their society.
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To him men of all races were natural leaders; women of all races, natural followers.

Hemings knew how Jefferson viewed women, and implicitly understood that if she were paired with an enslaved man she would have two men over her: her enslaved husband and Jefferson. She would be one step removed from the man who held power over both of them, and Jefferson would have no personal stake in her or the children she bore with another man. Paired with a white workingman, or another white man in Virginia, Hemings would be in a virtually identical situation, though a white man could seek to buy her and their children if he wanted to. That is what the Charlottesville merchant Thomas Bell did with Hemings’s sister Mary, but not until after Hemings returned from France. None of the other white men with whom her sisters were involved took this route. Jefferson would have to agree, and he might not if he received a better offer or simply wanted to be recalcitrant, as Francis Eppes IV had been when Hemings’s grandfather sought to buy her grandmother as a child.

The resolution of her conflict with Jefferson allowed Hemings to go home with the knowledge that she had a one-on-one relationship with the ultimate power at Monticello. The connection to John and Martha Wayles—an accident of biology over which she had no control—would no longer define her, and her family’s, ties to Jefferson. She was now more than just the sister of Jefferson’s wife and the aunt to his legitimate children. She would, in fact, be the mother of children he fathered. Their futures, and hers, now depended upon the dynamic of her interactions with Jefferson, which she could seek to structure directly. Her brothers and sisters were not just the biological aunts and uncles of Jefferson’s legal family; they would be the aunts and uncles of the children in his second family with her. Her siblings would now see him as the father of their nieces and nephews. She herself would always be for Jefferson the woman who had given up something of enormous value on the basis of his promises. He was in moral debt to her. With all of this, the focus of the Hemings family’s existence at Monticello would shift to Sally Hemings herself in a way that gave her a measure of influence over her life and the lives of her children, siblings, and extended clan.

Like other enslaved people when the all too rare chance presented itself, Hemings seized her moment and used the knowledge of her rights to make a decision based upon what she thought was best for her as a woman, family member, and a potential mother in her specific circumstances. She did not see Jefferson as the same type of man as her father, who had left his children in slavery, or she would never have trusted him. Elizabeth Hemings’s fate would not be her own. Unlike Celia trapped on an isolated Missouri farm with Robert Newsom, with no family support, and no surrounding culture and law in her favor, and unlike the overwhelming majority of enslaved women back in Virginia, Hemings had room to maneuver. She was in the position to consider whether Jefferson was a man she could spend the rest of her life having children with or take her freedom in France, be rid of him forever, and perhaps find someone else.

Hemings was young, and she was taking a very risky and, some might say, foolish chance. Had she been a free white girl on the threshold of embarking upon a legalized relationship with a man of whatever age, she could have consulted her mother and father. The most obvious patriarch in her life was the one asking her to commit to living with him. If Elizabeth Hemings had been there, or if she had been able to communicate with her daughter about this, she could have advised her that the safer route to protecting her freedom and achieving it for her offspring would be to go to the Parisian Admiralty Court and seek refuge in its established law and custom rather than “implicitly” relying on Jefferson’s promises.

Jefferson and Women, the Hemingses and Their French Options