The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (57 page)

They could not have known it at the time, but that gruesome scene of suicide—one of the last images of France—was an ironic comment on things to come.

“After being detained in Havre for ten days by contrary wind,” the Hemingses and Jeffersons left the city “before one o’clock in the morning” on October 8 and arrived at Cowes “at half after two in the morning” on October 9.
²⁶
They seemed to have worse luck with Channel crossings than with the actual trips across the ocean, which were placid. Just as Patsy had told of stormy conditions attending her trip with her father and James Hemings when they crossed the Channel coming to France, Jefferson painted a harrowing picture of the trip the other way, saying they all traveled under conditions that promoted “boisterous navigation and mortal sickness.”
²⁷
They landed, and there they waited another two weeks before the winds were favorable for sailing to Virginia.

Finally, on October 22, 1789, almost a month after they left Paris, James and Sally Hemings boarded the
Clermont
and started for Virginia. In the end, it was Jefferson’s friend the painter John Trumbull who put his very anxious friend together with a captain and a ship. Trumbull wrote from London to say that he had gone aboard the
Clermont
to satisfy himself that it was suitable, and he described the ship and its accommodations enthusiastically. It was, he said, “new and a good sailor” weighing “230 Tons” with “two large staterooms”—one that would be convenient for Jefferson and the other for his daughters. There was no mention of either James or Sally Hemings, but Trumbull’s description of the ship’s “very good quarter Deck for walking” reveals one important amenity the pair could take good advantage of to get a clear view of the Atlantic as they crossed it.
²⁸

There was a great deal more than the just the vast ocean expanse for them to observe. On his trip to France Jefferson noted the wide variety of ocean-based wildlife on display on the North Atlantic: numerous types of seabirds near land, and sharks and whales out in the open sea.
²⁹
With no other passengers on board, it was easy to meet Jefferson’s desire to have his daughters’ and Sally Hemings’s quarters in close proximity to one another, and for all the members of his household to have easy access to him. The
Clermont
was a floating version of the Hôtel de Langeac (with someone else beside Jefferson as the captain), as its former residents had a few more weeks to continue in the roles they had fashioned for themselves in Paris. This would be the last time that they, who had shared life as provincials abroad, building up a lifetime of memories, would live together as a defined unit. More importantly, every mile of the journey west made whatever personae the Hemingses created for themselves in France, as free or potentially free people, weaker and weaker. It is hard to think there was not some or even great trepidation in the hearts of these two young people (one who had a great deal riding on her young girl’s poignant trust in a man) as they faced return to a place that was primitive not only in its physical and cultural aspects but in its understanding of might’s relationship to right. The Jeffersons, on the other hand, as they sped toward America would merely become more powerful, their rights as masters and white people reconfirmed once they set foot on Virginian soil. Unlike the Hemingses, they had only the pleasures of living in Paris to lose.

A trip that was estimated to take nine weeks was made in about four, as Jefferson daily and dutifully noted the latitude and the “time from Paris by watch.” With the benefit of favorable winds and the “fine autumn weather,” Captain Colley decided to lay a straighter course across the ocean instead of the more circuitous route originally planned. They reached Norfolk on November 23 amid a shroud of fog. After waiting for it to lift, the captain maneuvered the ship into port into a “strong head wind” that was at the same time speeding along another vessel on its way out of port. The two ships narrowly avoided collision, and the outgoing vessel grazed the
Clermont
, taking off “part of [the ship’s] rigging.” They managed to make it safely to shore, but the mishaps continued.
³⁰

One of the chief advantages of travel on the
Clermont
was that some of Jefferson’s enormous amount of baggage could be taken along with him instead of having to be shipped separately. In the weeks before he left Paris, he sent thirty-eight large packages to Le Havre to be loaded onto the ship for the trip home. His shipping list noted several trunks and other containers—“a leather portmanteau” (a large suitcase) and a “painted wooden box”—of “servts clothes,” which carried James and Sally Hemings’s apparel and belongings.
³¹
Other items of their clothing were packed away in the trunk and boot of Jefferson’s phaeton. They had acquired numerous possessions during their stay abroad. The benefit of traveling home with them instead having them shipped separately turned into a near-catastrophe. About two hours after they disembarked, before their belongings had been removed, the
Clermont
caught fire. The vessel was almost lost, along with all of Jefferson’s public papers and everyone’s personal belongs. For what must have been a harrowing period, the enslaved brother and sister faced the loss of almost everything they had accumulated during what could only have been (and would likely remain) the greatest adventure of their lives. They could have their memories, but they certainly wanted to be able to touch and share with their family the mementos of their days as Parisians—the dresses, suits, other items that would never be available to them in Virginia. Any presents brought home for their mother and siblings could have perished, too. Fortunately, the fire was doused, but not before the ship suffered substantial damage. Only the “thickness of the traveling trunks” saved the Hemingses from the loss of nearly all physical evidence that they had ever been in France.
³²

Although disaster on the
Clermont
was averted, the brother and sister were now back in a slave society. Moreover, they soon had news that suggested they would be there forever: Jefferson might not be going back to France after all. Madison’s query about his willingness to join the government had been transformed into an actual request to serve as the first secretary of state of the United States of America. Word of the appointment was in the newspapers. It was also in the address of the committee of Norfolk politicians who formally greeted Jefferson on behalf of the town two days after he arrived there. His reply to the citizens of Norfolk suggests that he knew it might be difficult to turn down the request.
³³

James Hemings, of course, had a great deal to think and feel deeply about when he learned of Jefferson’s possible new position, which would keep him in America if he accepted it. He had crossed the ocean with every expectation of going back to Paris and knew that he might have a second chance of obtaining freedom on his own. While Jefferson could look past his reluctance to accept the appointment and see the enormous honor it was that a man so esteemed as George Washington had selected him for it, the appointment meant nothing for James Hemings except the promise of a change of venue within the continental United States. New York, the national capital, was not Virginia, but it was hardly free soil like Paris. It was instead, like the Old Dominion, still very much a slave society. He would gain greater proximity to his family, and that was a benefit, but Hemings’s actions after his emancipation suggest that proximity to family was not the only consideration for him. He had a broader conception of how he wanted to go through the world.

All of this had a meaning for Sally Hemings as well. Though she had no reasonable prospect of returning to France, news that Jefferson might accept a job that would take him away from Monticello to New York was a clear and serious reminder of the unpredictability of the life she had decided to come back to, how Jefferson could start out with one firm set of expectations and have them frustrated or altered because of others’ actions. She was back in slavery now, bereft of any law to turn to and under his complete control, with no basis for bargaining with him about anything except the basis of whatever she knew about his feelings for her. Perhaps only he and she fully understood the reason for her renewed presence in the country—that it was at his instigation. Encouraging her to give up something he knew was valuable created a moral obligation on his part far beyond what any other member of his family could have really appreciated. At the same time, her brother’s situation was different, seemingly even more heartbreaking. A door he thought was still open when he left Paris and crossed the ocean to come home was closing for him, and as far as he knew he might never see Paris again.

The British navy’s bombardment of Norfolk during the Revolutionary War had effects that were still evident when the Hemingses arrived in 1789. There was a shortage of housing and, for a brief time, a question about where they all would stay, until some men at a hotel called Lindsay’s graciously vacated their rooms in favor of the Jefferson party. Sally Hemings likely stayed with Patsy and Polly. James Hemings slept in a “hamac” in some part of the hotel. He had to do that only for a few days because the party left Norfolk on November 29 and proceeded to Richmond by way of Williamsburg, stopping at the homes of Jefferson’s friends and relatives. After Richmond it was on to Eppington, the home of Elizabeth and Francis Eppes, who had sent Sally Hemings to Paris.
³⁴

It would probably take Tolstoy, who could think of his own illegitimate son by a peasant woman, a man who served as Tolstoy’s coachman and lived on his estate, to truly realize, capture, and convey the mix of tragedy, absurdity, touching vulnerability, flawed humanity, hopeful expectation—the almost Shakespearean quality of the family gathering at Eppington during those days in December.
³⁵
Elizabeth Eppes had sent her enslaved sister, the child of her slave-owner father, to live with her brother-in-law, another slave owner. That sister now came back home carrying her brother-in-law’s child, extending the mixture of black and white, slave and free—and secrecy and rejection—into another generation.

Whether this was something Jefferson talked about in confidence to his in-laws is currently unknown, though he could not have had more sympathetic people to hear and understand his story. The Eppeses were entirely devoted to him, and their connection to the Hemings family was now well into its fifth decade, having started with Sally Hemings’s African grandmother. They had seen this before and knew that, rather than being some wildly improbable circumstance, it was one of the things that happened in slave-owning societies when males and females lived in close contact with one another. John Wayles first connected the blood lines between the two families, so Elizabeth Eppes and her sister Martha had been in the same position with him that Patsy and Polly Jefferson were now in with their father. The shroud of secrecy that covers over many families’ embarrassing and difficult entanglements descended.

It is not at all clear that Jefferson would have had to say anything to the Eppeses about Hemings as he passed the days with the couple at Eppington, or to Hemings’s other half sister Anne Skipwith and her husband, whom he also visited before continuing on to Monticello. The most common picture of Hemings upon her return to America, drawn by Fawn Brodie’s influential work, is that of a young woman, “big with child,”
³⁶
whose condition was immediately apparent to all who saw her. Because we do not know when Hemings’s child was born—“soon after her arrival,” as her son said, could have been a few months—we do not know how far along in her pregnancy she was during that fall and early winter. Unlike women who have had multiple pregnancies, many first-time mothers do not even begin to “show” their pregnancies until they are into their sixth month—their abdominal muscles still firm and unchallenged by having carried a baby to term. Not all women experience morning sickness with every pregnancy. Even if Hemings was sick on board the ship, so were all the others periodically, at least before they got out into the open sea. Beyond that, this was a time when mysterious illnesses (bacterial and viral) struck people with some regularity. Sally Hemings’s condition may not have been known to anyone but her, Jefferson, and, perhaps, her brother. If it was still a secret at this point, it was one that could not last.

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W
ORMLEY
H
UGHES, THE
grandson of Elizabeth Hemings and the oldest son of Betty Brown, was eight years old when his uncle and aunt James and Sally Hemings came back to Monticello on December 23, 1789.
¹
As an elderly man, he described their arrival to Jefferson biographer Henry Randall, who saw this as an event in the lives of Jefferson and his white daughters, not in the lives of the brother and sister traveling with him. Randall had spent a great deal of time at Monticello and its environs, talking with people who knew Jefferson in order to shape what would be his three-volume story of the president’s life. He knew the name Sally Hemings, probably before he began work, but certainly after he very famously spoke with Jefferson’s grandson about her as he did research for his book in the 1850s.
²
It is very unlikely that he did not know that she, too, was in the carriage that brought the soon to be secretary of state back to the mountain that December, and that her brother James was along as well.

Randall boasted of his familiarity with Jefferson’s Farm Book and memorandum books, so he also knew that virtually all the individuals who served Jefferson atop Monticello were members of the same family, that the elderly man relating the story of what happened the day the Jeffersons returned to Monticello was a part of that family, and thus had an interest in the day’s homecoming that went beyond his observations about the white master and mistresses returning to their domain. Hughes’s mother’s sister and brother—his grandmother’s children—had come back from their long stay in a far-off land that was indeed a parallel world. This was, for him, a completely unprecedented type of family reunion.

Hughes’s memory of his returning relatives was either dim or nonexistent. James Hemings had left the country when Hughes was three years old, and had been away from Monticello traveling with Jefferson or working on his own before then. Sally Hemings was at Eppington during those same years. But he had undoubtedly heard references to the pair and shared with his mother and the rest of his family excitement at their return. When Hughes spoke with Randall many years later, he was into his seventh decade as a black person in Virginia, and likely understood that Randall had no real interest in that aspect of the story, that his relatives were invisible to the historian—or at least were to be invisible in the record of Jefferson’s life that he wanted to make—unless he could use their words or a story about them to bolster his preferred way of viewing and presenting his subject. For those goals Hughes’s conversation with Randall did not disappoint.

The scene of jubilant slaves wildly celebrating the arrival of their long-absent master is a staple of southern apologias for slavery, offered as proof that slaves were contented, if not downright ecstatic, in their condition. Hughes’s account, along with one given by Martha Randolph, is certainly in that vein. Both told essentially the same story from their different vantage points: members of the enslaved community at Monticello and the quarter farms at the base of the mountain were extremely happy to have Jefferson home. Hughes’s account, as relayed by Randall, however, was even more dramatic in its portrayal of the slaves’ expression of devotion to Jefferson.
³

Because his original plans to come home were so long delayed, Jefferson’s statement of what he desired in the way of “servants” at Monticello, where he planned to stay about two months, had been sent to Nicholas Lewis almost a year before his arrival. In addition to the “provision of garden-stuff…two months supply of bacon, corn & c,” he named the people he expected to be there to attend him. “As for servants, Great George, Ursula, Betty Hemings will be there, of course, and if Martin and Bob can join us for the time it will suffice.”
⁴
It was to be a low-key affair, coming home for a short time, setting his daughters up at Eppington, meeting with his brothers-in-law at Monticello to help settle the Wayles debt, going to New York to make reports and pay his respects to George Washington in the new nation’s capital, and then returning to France for as short a time as possible.

Given the slave network’s great efficiency at transmitting intelligence, it is likely that the black people on Jefferson’s plantations knew not long after he set foot in Norfolk that he was on his way home. The only question was what day he would arrive. When they found out he was coming at a point so close to Christmas, when they would have had time “off” anyway, they asked to be allowed to leave work to greet him. They gathered first at the foot of the mountain and then moved farther along the road until they were about two miles out, near Shadwell. In Martha Randolph’s telling of the story, as soon as the carriage appeared, amid great shouts of joy, “[t]hey collected in crowds round it and almost drew it up the mountain by hand.” In Wormley Hughes’s memory, when the carriage reached a certain point, the slaves, defying Jefferson’s explicit orders not to, removed the carriage horses, then “pushed and dragged the heavy vehicle” to the top of the heavily forested red clay mountain.
⁵
If Randolph or Hughes mentioned to Randall who was driving the carriage, and his reaction to all this, the historian did not relay this information. James Hemings was almost surely the coachman that day. Randolph’s and Hughes’s memories reconverged on one specific point: as soon as the carriage came to rest near the house, and Jefferson opened the door and attempted to step out of it, his feet never touched the ground. He was immediately lifted into the air and carried into the main house while the slaves kissed him and strained to touch him all along the way.
⁶

After noting the discrepancy between Hughes’s account and Randolph’s on how the carriage got up the mountain, Randall, in a fascinating and utterly instructive reversal of normal policy, flatly and happily declared the black man’s account more trustworthy than that of the upper-class white woman’s. “We consider old Wormley’s authority the best on this point!” he wrote, clearly relishing Hughes’s particular details about the “African ovation,” as Randall termed what happened when Jefferson arrived at his mountain.
⁷
During the antebellum period in which Randall’s book appeared, in 1858, it may have been good for sales, at least in the South, to highlight such an excessive display by slaves of their affection for their master—voluntarily turning themselves into beasts of burden
over their master’s protests
—to reassure white southerners and to rebuke the implacable northern abolitionists who had named slavery a cruel and barbarous system. The blacks were eager to be slaves, and the benevolent whites only reluctantly took up the burden of being their masters. If the conditions existing in this “organic” relationship had really been cruel and barbarous, slaves would never have been so happy to see their oppressor.

Whether they actually pushed or pulled the carriage up the mountain or merely walked or ran alongside it, there is no reason to doubt that most of the enslaved people who gathered to greet Jefferson were truly happy to see him return. But, as with all stories, context is everything. It is just as likely that for the vast majority of them, who could not have known him in any real sense, Jefferson was more of an idea than a real person. Unlike the Hemingses, whose sons, brothers, daughters, and sisters lived and traveled with him, slaves down the mountain, particularly in the era before his retirement, would not have had the occasion for enough contact with Jefferson to have loved him in any meaningful sense—even had they had an inclination actually to do that. “Loving” from afar is the very definition of loving the idea of a person rather than the actual thing. He had been effectively gone from Monticello for almost eight years, nearly all of Hughes’s lifetime on the date this memory was made. Moreover, Hughes was telling his story long after he had spent years taking care of Jefferson’s horses and acting as the principal gardener at Monticello, and thus overseeing two of Jefferson’s great passions—long after Jefferson had spent years fathering several of Hughes’s first cousins, long after the days when Jefferson would put in a few token moments puttering in the garden some evenings with Hughes, and long after Hughes had dug Jefferson’s grave.
⁸

The filter through which Hughes’s memories were reanimated and transmitted was idiosyncratic and deeply personal. He had associations and memories of Jefferson shared by no other members of the enslaved community on the road to Monticello that day. This does not make what he said untrue, although Randall tended to embellish stories, and it is entirely possible that he took what was Hughes’s true story of a basic expression of respectful joy and turned it into an Albemarle County proslavery pageant play. The other enslaved people who greeted Jefferson, many older and far more knowledgeable about life than the young boy taking in that scene, had important reasons to be happy to see him besides irrational feelings of affection for one whom they knew largely by sight and reputation. The
idea
of Jefferson, what he represented, more likely fueled their enthusiasm.

Enslaved people’s closest human associations and familiar surroundings often brought a form of stability and comfort. That was virtually all they had. Because they were treated as property, however, they understood the tenuous nature of their connections to persons and places. In fact, many of those present with Hughes that day were in that place because their original owner, John Wayles, had died and left them as the property of another man. They, or people of whom they knew, had been required to pull up stakes and move to accommodate their master’s changed family situation. Even Jefferson’s time in France, well short of an actual death, caused significant dislocations in the lives of the enslaved community. Many were leased out and thus separated from their families and homes with no idea when or if they would be reunited with loved ones in what had become their settled place in the world. To make matters more frightening still, that place—the farms that made up Monticello—had deteriorated significantly while Jefferson was away. The land was wasted and even the house itself, the very symbol of him, neglected and run down. None of this was hidden.
⁹

Enslaved people were well familiar with the basic contours of agricultural life, as they formed the core ingredient to it and suffered under it. Farmers borrowed money and paid it back with the crop itself or the proceeds from the sale of the crop. Even the only minimally observant among the enslaved community understood that a failing farm lessened the owner’s ability to pay creditors—those ever-present specters in the lives of Virginia planters. Unhappy and unfulfilled creditors led to voluntary sales of assets (very often, the slaves themselves) or foreclosures and auctions carried out under terms designed to suit creditors. In that most dire situation, the will of even a “benevolent” owner who wanted to keep a family together could be thwarted. Slaves regularly lost their mothers, fathers, children, and other relatives to this process.

Against that backdrop, the idea of Jefferson—healthy and returned—was a reason to cheer far beyond what he meant to them as a flesh-and-blood man, representing as he did that day their best chance for a degree of stability and a return to normality. Now that he was back, perhaps everyone else could come home, too. Those greeting Jefferson that day held many different images in their heads and hearts as they moved across land that the law (with the physical force to back it up) tied them to, whether they wanted to be there or not. They were cheering out of hope for themselves and the lives of their families within the very limited framework allotted to them, not necessarily, as Randall would have it, for their unlimited love for the man who owned them.

T
HE ALMOST FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD
Elizabeth Hemings welcomed home her son and daughter who had been away in a distant place for years. Few Afro-Virginian women in her position ever experienced such a thing: to be able to listen to her children describe a world across an ocean that they had come to know intimately, perhaps bringing gifts and certainly bringing knowledge of a different language and culture from that faraway place. She, and no one else in her time, had the same expectations about maintaining easy contact with absent relatives that exist in the modern world. For all his wealth and power, Jefferson himself could not make a ship carrying a letter travel faster across the ocean than any other man could. Near the end of his stay in France, he sent the only letter he ever wrote to his younger brother, Randolph, while he was abroad, in which he makes clear that he did not even know how many children his brother had.
¹⁰
He communicated more with his sister and in-laws, with whom he was close, but those contacts, too, were invariably far apart in time. Even within those structural limits on communication, Jefferson at least was part of a social world in which all the immediate members of his family were literate, if some only marginally so. Words on a page connected them to people far beyond the sound of voices, conveying information and providing physical evidence that, within the time of sending and receiving, the correspondent was still present on earth.

Though Elizabeth Hemings lived in a world where oral communication was primarily the order of the day, her sons Robert and James Hemings could easily have written to one another while James and Sally were overseas.
¹¹
If brother and sister did send any letters or packages to Monticello from France, no traces of them remain. Their communications, however, would not have been a part of Jefferson’s record of his incoming and outgoing correspondence, so one cannot look to his papers to decide the matter. Those items would have gone the way of the vast majority of the documents and personal property of families who do not feel compelled to preserve their family history for posterity, or who try to do that but are thwarted by fires, floods, carelessness, and other mishaps. Jefferson’s records do show that throughout the 1790s, Robert Hemings, when he was away from Monticello and after his emancipation, wrote at least five letters to Jefferson, and Jefferson wrote at least one letter to him. Given the fate of other letters that had a high probability of a mention of Sally Hemings—one would expect a brother to ask the man who was living with his sister how she and other family members were faring—it is not surprising that all of those letters are missing from the collection of Jefferson’s correspondence.
¹²