The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (61 page)

It is not clear where Sally Hemings was in the spring of 1790. The most reasonable estimate of the absolute latest month in which she could have given birth was May, and it is not known how long her child lived. Martha and Maria were supposed to go to Eppington right after Martha’s wedding at the end of February, and Jefferson left for New York at the beginning of March, thinking his daughters and son-in-law would start right out for the Eppeses. It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that Hemings would have been expected to go with them if she was in the last stages of her pregnancy or had already given birth, and had a newborn (the Jefferson daughter’s half sibling) to look after.

As things turned out, Martha and Maria did not get to Eppington for another two and a half months—until the middle of May. At the end of April they were at Tuckahoe, stranded there because they did not have their own horses, and Tom did not want to borrow his father’s to make the trip.
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They explained this to a somewhat baffled Betsy Eppes, who told Jefferson that she and her husband could easily have supplied them with horses had they just written to say there was a problem.
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Why the logistics of their trip had not been discussed and set before Jefferson even left is unclear. This seems another curious lapse in fatherly attention, though he may have felt it appropriate to step aside and let the new husband take matters into his own hands. If that was the case, Tom’s performance was a portent of things to come.

Hemings was apparently at Eppington by summer’s end, however. Tom and Martha sent for her there sometime in August, for Maria Jefferson referred to this in an undated letter to her brother-in-law written, most likely, before the last week in September 1790. Maria’s language suggests that about six weeks had gone by since the last communication with her sister. Then she went on to mention Hemings. “We were at Cumberland when you sent for Sally but she was not well enough to have gone.” Elizabeth Eppes’s sister and Hemings’s half sister, Ann Wayles Skipwith, lived in Cumberland County, and Eppes visited her sister regularly.
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The nature of Hemings’s illness is unknown.

There is no extant written explanation for why the Randolphs sent for Hemings. By midsummer the couple had concluded that Varina was ruining their health. Determined to move away as quickly as possible, they already had their eyes on Edgehill in Albemarle County. Monticello would be their way station until they gained ownership of it.
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There was no urgency, at that late date, to take Hemings there to help put in order a house they expected to abandon shortly. If she was called to Varina to help, it was to help an overwhelmed Martha pack up to get ready to leave. The timing of the Randolphs’ request, however, suggests that bringing Hemings to them was more likely about Monticello than about Varina.

At the beginning of August, Jefferson wrote to Martha, directing her to send word to Hemings’s brothers Martin and Robert to make sure that they were at Monticello by September 1 to “have things prepared” by the time he got there.
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Martha and Tom Randolph were likely planning to send Sally Hemings to Monticello, perhaps with one or both of her brothers, to help everyone get ready for Jefferson’s arrival. He had told the young couple even before his August letter to expect him (and meet him) there near the beginning of September.
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There was, then, at the end of the summer of 1790, a gathering of all the Hemingses who formed the basic foundation of the personal staff at Monticello. Everyone who was supposed to be there would be there when Jefferson arrived.

Gabriella Harvie and “Sarah Jefferson”

By the time Jefferson returned to Monticello that September, it was clear that his idea of finding a home for Martha and her husband in Albemarle might not work out, for reasons that strangely mirrored his own personal circumstances. He planned to talk with Thomas Mann Randolph Sr. about selling Edgehill to the newlyweds.
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A complication arose in the form of Gabriella Harvie, Randolph Sr.’s seventeen-year-old soon to be new wife, whose turn through the Randolph household calls to mind the phrase “white tornado.” Jefferson, forty-seven, and Randolph, fifty, boyhood friends and cousins, had both taken up with teenage girls of almost the exact same age—Jefferson, with a young girl from his household, Randolph, with a girl who lived on the plantation right next door. Like Jefferson, Randolph had probably known the young object of his attention all her life. It is also very likely that his children—some of whom were around Harvie’s age, some older, some younger—had known her, too, for in the close-knit world of the Virginia gentry, the Randolphs and Harvies undoubtedly socialized. The Jeffersons knew Harvie as well. Her grandfather John Harvie had been one of Jefferson’s guardians after his father died.
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This was a difficult circumstance for the Randolph children, especially the daughters. Whatever qualms she had had about marrying him (discussed in chapter 15), once married, Harvie almost immediately proceeded to wrap her much older husband around her finger (it did not take very long) and moved to ensure that any children they had would be favored over his previous large set. By the time she was finished, Randolph Sr. had seen fit to name his first son with her
Thomas Mann Randolph
, symbolically erasing his first son from his prior marriage. Though Virginia did not follow primogeniture, the symbolism of the first son as the head of his group of siblings remained. It was as if Randolph Sr. felt he was starting his life all over again. In a sense he was. His new bride was the same age as the woman he had married decades before. Between the time of his second marriage, at the end of 1790, and his death, in 1793, the couple had two children, a daughter who died in infancy and the son mentioned above.
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Had Randolph lived as long as Jefferson, he could have had as many children with Gabriella as he had with his first wife, Anne.

All this was a devastating blow to young Tom Randolph, whose struggles with depression and feelings of inadequacy could likely be treated today with medication and/or therapy. The saga of Randolph Sr. and Harvie also greatly alarmed Martha, who worried openly, and evidently without shame, about what this would mean for the distribution of property within her husband’s family. She had married the presumptive scion of Tuckahoe, of which she would be the mistress, and now the current master of the plantation had decided he wanted a brand-new family. Martha wrote to her father about this matter in the very same July 2 letter in which she addressed the issue of requiring a maid.

Jefferson never responded to Martha in writing about the need to have a new maid, but he answered the part of her letter voicing concerns about Harvie in one of the most eloquent, wise, and deeply revealing pieces of prose that he ever wrote. Unlike other of his admonitions to young people that seem old-fashioned and stale, even for his own time, the universality and timelessness of parts of this letter to his daughter about how to respond to Harvie take him far beyond meaningless cliché and describe the human condition with a clarity that echoes across the centuries. He was able to achieve this, of course, because of his remarkable facility with language, but it was also because he was not affecting a pose or mouthing empty words or the kind of rote platitudes fashioned to suit any occasion that an older person might say to a younger one. He was speaking to his adored daughter from his heart, and he wanted her to really hear that, addressing her as one human being to another. Like all good writing, it was intended to, and does, operate on more than one level, for Jefferson was not just speaking about the problem with Harvie; he was speaking about himself, his daughter, and all who must live in society with others and who want to maintain some sense of peace and happiness—an equilibrium—while doing that.

While Martha may have reconciled herself to Harvie (she had no choice, for she could not make Harvie disappear), she never ceased thinking about the importance of property and inheritance to family life. Jefferson’s white family tradition has noted, with a faint hint of criticism, her keen interest in her own children’s ability to acquire property through their marriages as if she thought this, rather than love, was the most important consideration for their matches.
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That mild note of censure seems a bit unfair, given that acquiring and maintaining property was an ever-present obsession throughout Anglo-Virginian culture. Getting property had allowed a man like her grandfather John Wayles, who was a “nobody” in English society, to become a “somebody” in America. That process had replicated itself thousands of times and would continue to do so in the future. Property was the engine that drove the society, for good and for ill.

Randolph was a product of her time and place. In her day, even more than in her children’s day, when love began its ascendance as the primary purpose for unions between males and females, marriage was very much about property and the eventual disposition of it. In that property-obsessed and male-dominated society in which both Jefferson daughters were raised, women were especially vulnerable, as their futures depended upon the choices made by the men in their lives—fathers, then husbands or whoever was the designated patriarch in the family. Living under that regime and being women of the upper class, Martha and Maria Jefferson did not have the same expectations about life as many modern women who can leave home, take up a profession, support themselves, and chart a new course if disappointed about a domestic situation. Their grandfather John Wayles came to America with nothing but his talent, ambition, and skin color. Because he was a man and white, he could enter a profession and be befriended by other men who put him in the position to become a wealthy landowner. If one job or venture did not work out, he could pull up stakes and begin anew elsewhere. His was not a woman’s story. Protected daughterhood and well-made marriages that solidified and protected family property were women’s routes to personal happiness.

If property and family were their chief sources of support, stability, and self-esteem, white women had to work (and hope) to maintain both. An awkward private arrangement at home was to be dealt with by adjusting one’s attitude, something that women throughout the ages have been trained and expected to do when dealing with the men in their lives—their fathers, husbands, and lovers. That came with the territory of being a woman. As her father told her later on in a less inspiring passage in the letter described above, the more skillfully she handled difficult and personal family situations, the more respect observers of the scene would have for her. Here was a message that one would expect Jefferson and other men of his era, white or black, as a matter of fact, to deliver, one that promoted a very traditional notion of virtuous womanhood. Women achieved respect by bearing the improprieties or transgressions of others in silence or without too obvious rancor. Jefferson and other men saw this as part of the balance of life: men had their trials to endure in the outside world, and women had their trials on the domestic front.

Some trials are more difficult than others, and realizing that things could always be much worse often shapes one’s response to an unhappy situation. The true nightmare scenario for an upper-class daughter in the world in which Martha Randolph lived was not a widower father in thrall to a slave woman who bore his children; it was the potential loss of property—the source of family wealth, social stability, prestige, and patrimony, along with the personal identity all those things provided—when her father remarried and had another set of legitimate white heirs. Having to manage an embarrassing circumstance that was a well-known hazard of the way of life that they had chosen and was, otherwise, tremendously beneficial to them was one thing; facing the concrete effects of a deed, an inter vivos gift, a transfer of title, or a disappointing will or marriage settlement—all giving property to someone else’s children—was quite another. Tom Randolph, and Martha, would have had nothing to fear if his father had chosen to take up with a seventeen-year-old enslaved girl instead of marrying a seventeen-year-old free white one.

Property united the past, present, and future, through the great events of life—birth, marriage, and death. This did not simply address itself to the passions and needs of one man and one woman in a particular generation; it affected generations to come. In their Anglo-Virginian world, both Jefferson daughters could fully expect that whatever was the meaning of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings would die a mercifully restrained death with them. No marriage license, no white family acknowledgment, the only one that counted in their world, no grant of land, no intestate succession would bind them to their black half siblings. Once Hemings and Jefferson were “over,” they would all go their separate ways forever—Jefferson’s legitimate heirs, with the honor of a recognized connection to him and his property (they thought); the Hemings children, with their freedom and whatever he had given them over the course of the years under the heavy mantle of his discretion.

Unsettling as her father’s relationship with Hemings may have been to Martha Randolph, the dispute with her father-in-law about Edgehill in 1790 through 1791 (and the eventual disposition of the famous family home, Tuckahoe, which went to Gabriella’s Thomas Mann Randolph)
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provided a stark lesson that he had actually done her and her sister a tremendous favor by becoming involved with a woman who was in no position to pull a Gabriella Harvie in her nuclear family. She cannot have looked at the marriage of her father’s boyhood friend to a young woman who was exactly her age, a girl whom she knew personally, and not have wondered if a similar thing could happen in her life and what the fallout from it might be. There but for the grace of God—and Sally Hemings—she and her sister might have gone. No matter what her father had promised or thought at the time, neither she nor he (nor Sally Hemings, for that matter) knew for certain in 1790 that he was never going to meet another white woman he wanted to marry.