The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (62 page)

Martha Randolph observed firsthand over the years the poignant struggles, emotional and financial, of Thomas Mann Randolph Sr.’s daughters, brought on, in part, by the aftershocks from his remarriage. One of the most searing aspects of their father’s union with Harvie—aside from its quickness, for their mother had died only the year before—was that Harvie immediately began to exercise the prerogatives of the wife of the household. Just months after her wedding, she redecorated the house, “painting the black walnut wall in the first floor parlor white.”
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Nancy Randolph, who had served as the mistress of the house after her mother’s death, was summarily supplanted. One by one, the sisters sought refuge in others’ home: Nancy, very fatefully at her brother-in-law’s home; Bizarre, Harriet, Jane, and Virginia, spending time with their brother and Martha at Edgehill and at Monticello, no doubt telling stories about their predicament. Harriet became a favorite of Jefferson’s and was the probable source of the name for his and Hemings’s daughters, one who died as an infant and one who lived.
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It is perhaps too facile to cast Harvie as the “evil teenage stepmother” for choosing to do what the Anglo-American property system gave her the perfect “right” to do. She was entitled to act as, because she was, the mistress of Tuckahoe, and could not reasonably have been expected to carry herself as if the first Mrs. Randolph were still alive and in the house. Even with that, Randolph Sr. bore some responsibility for the less than artful way matters proceeded. Thomas Jefferson was not Thomas Mann Randolph. If he had chosen a new bride, she might not have been at all like Harvie and even if she had been, she might not have been able to run Jefferson the way Randolph evidently let Harvie run him. Nonetheless, the risk of such a turn of events was always there. Jefferson, like any wealthy (or perceived to be wealthy) man, was “marriage material” for somebody until the day he died. As long as her father remained attached to Sally Hemings, Martha, her sister, and their children would be safe in the way that most mattered to them and others of their class during the eighteenth century.

Property was central, but there was an emotional component to the matter as well. Imagine Thomas Jefferson remarried in 1790 to a free and white Sarah Hemings by whom he had three white sons, William Beverley, James Madison, and Thomas Eston, with a “very beautiful”
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daughter Harriet thrown in for good measure. Even if she had been the total opposite of Harvie, Jefferson’s very ideal of a domestic “angel,” the dynamics of his relationship with his older daughters and their children could not have remained the same with a Sarah Jefferson living and sleeping with him while presiding over his household.

Sarah Jefferson’s primary duty would have been to secure her own and her sons’ and daughter’s places in her husband’s heart, with the opportunity to do that every moment of the day. Under any circumstances, Jefferson’s grandchildren would have been his absolute delight. But if they had been forced to compete with his legitimate white children who were in the same generation—the birth of an eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, followed six years later by the birth of an eldest son, William Beverley Jefferson—things would have been much different. Only if Beverley Jefferson had turned out to be an absolute disappointment could one have expected his father to favor his first grandson over his first son. Martha and her family would always have been welcomed to her father’s home for visits long and short, but it is doubtful that she would have been able to move her husband and all her children there and act as the mistress of Monticello if her father had had another legal family. That could not have been accomplished without diminishing the position of his wife, unless Martha’s subordination to the new Mrs. Jefferson in the running of the household had been made absolutely clear to everyone. Under those circumstances (unlikely to be satisfactory to either woman), Martha would have had to, or wanted to, stay in her own home with her own husband, thus losing some of the intimacy and familiarity that shaped the contours of her and her children’s attachment to her father over the years. Without even being able to see all the way down the road, anyone who knew and valued the rules of family, property, and slavery in Virginia understood the differing levels of threat posed by a Sally Hemings versus a Gabriella Harvie.

Martha and Tom eventually settled at Edgehill, but years after they wanted to. Varina was somewhat worse than merely uncomfortable to them, so it was decided that fall that they would live on the mountain for a time. Accordingly, Jefferson wrote a memorandum to Nicholas Lewis, who was still overseeing his farms and slaves, listing Sally Hemings, along with her relatives, as one who would be available to attend to the needs of his daughter and son-in-law, most likely using her skills as a seamstress. Hemings was, by this time, just as he described her: one member (the third on the list) of Monticello house slaves who could, if needed, do things for his daughters.
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He could not very well have told Lewis that she was really in a position different from that of the rest of her kin and outlined any different course of treatment of her.

We have come to better understand, as our society’s values have changed and black people’s position in the United States has improved, that Jefferson and members of his white family are not to be taken as the only, or even the best, sources of information about life at Monticello. What they wrote, and did not choose to write, about their relations with their human property does not define the total reality of either their lives or the lives of those whom they enslaved. Members of the Hemings family, other enslaved people on the mountain, and members of Jefferson’s nearby community provided an answer to the question of why and how the trajectory of Sally Hemings’s life changed in 1790, just after she had returned to the United States. Their answers provide a valuable framework in which to read Jefferson’s white family’s letters and other documents that bear on the lives of the Hemingses.

The explanatory power of an answer, or a story, if you will, is the truest and best measure of its credibility, how it illuminates without effort the meaning of the seemingly unrelated details, circumstances, and actions that exist in the world around it. It is most reliable when the providers of the answer or story had no ability to affect, or were even totally unaware of, all those details, circumstances, and actions. Madison Hemings, who described an event that took place in his mother’s life in 1790—she had a baby who “lived but a short time”
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—was not alive when Jefferson, his daughter, and sister-in-law wrote the letters that support his recounting of the important event that changed his mother’s life that year. He certainly did not have access to Jefferson’s family letters, which remained in his white family’s hands long after he had left Virginia in the 1830s.

When Martha Randolph and Elizabeth Eppes wrote letters in the first half of 1790 saying that Martha needed a maid, and Jefferson responded by providing her with someone other than Sally Hemings and fixed Maria’s life so that she would not need Hemings either, they did not know that eighty-three years later Madison Hemings would flesh out the meaning of what they were talking about and doing during that spring and summer. When, in 1802, Jefferson’s neighbors, who assumed that all the children Hemings bore in the 1790s lived, said that she had five children and that her oldest child was about twelve, they had no knowledge of what Jefferson and his family wrote in 1790.
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Had they been able to read those letters and had known of his actions that year, they would have immediately understood why Hemings eased out of her role as the personal maid to Martha and Maria Jefferson in 1790.

Even Ellen Coolidge could not escape the powerful gravity of an accurate answer. Just as her comments about maids in Jefferson’s rooms unwittingly dovetailed with Madison Hemings’s descriptions of his mother’s role in life, she also unwittingly shed light on Hemings’s situation in 1790. Coolidge asked plaintively, almost as if she, as a sixty-two-year-old woman, was still trying to sort this out herself, how it could be that her grandfather would have “selected the female attendant of his own pure children to become his paramour”?
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Of course, men have conducted affairs with the housekeepers, nannies, and governesses to their children from time immemorial, and one would be hard pressed to characterize the
unmarried
ones among their number as presumptively evil.

The historian Nell Irvin Painter, in her study of the journals of Ella Gertrude Clancy Thomas, a long-suffering nineteenth-century southern planter’s wife, has written eloquently about the phenomenon of what psychologists call “deception clues” and “leakages.”
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Both refer to the situation, familiar to police interrogators, where a person seeking to hide damaging or very painful truths accidentally reveals those hidden truths, or leaves clues to them, in the stories he or she tells for public consumption. Coolidge reflexively associated the start of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship with the days in Paris when Hemings was, in fact, an “attendant” to Jefferson’s “pure children,” inviting readers to conjure up images of Patsy’s and Polly’s wounded girlhoods, while skipping over the many later years that Jefferson could have “selected” Hemings.

Ellen had no personal memory of either her mother or Aunt Maria as pure children attended to by Sally Hemings. By the time she was old enough to pay any attention to Hemings, Jefferson’s oldest “pure children” were grown and married women, one of them, obviously, Ellen’s mother. Maria, married and moved away from Monticello in 1797, when Ellen was one, and dead in 1804, when she was eight, was not much in Ellen’s memory at all. In a very poignant letter to her mother written in 1820, twenty-four-year-old Ellen confessed that she had “almost entirely forgotten” her aunt.
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The Sally Hemings whom Ellen knew and remembered from her days at Monticello was the mother of Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston—all born well after her days in France. Who had said, at the time of Coolidge’s letter, that Jefferson had chosen Hemings as his paramour
while she was an attendant to
his children? It was, of course, Madison Hemings who said that his father had “selected” his mother “during that time,” and that was how she came to have a baby in 1790. He did not say that in print, however, until fifteen years after Coolidge’s letter. Coolidge (inadvertently) and Hemings (deliberately), each unaware of the other’s comments, put France at the heart of both of their statements about the origins of Sally Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson.

In the end, right answers and true stories have a positive cascading effect because they illuminate. They enable one to notice and make sense of things that one might have ignored or thought incomprehensible without them, thus allowing for a clearer picture of the world one is surveying. Wrong answers and false stories obscure matters and have little or no explanatory power. They shed no light on the facts, circumstances, or actions in the world they purport to describe, because they are not really of that world, and thus cannot help explain it. Instead, they tend to make matters more confusing, by creating their own negative cascading effect, as other bad answers, weak, illogical, and/or simply false stories must be offered to shore up the original wrong answer’s deficiencies.

The explanatory power of Monticello slaves’ answer to the question of who Sally Hemings came to be to Thomas Jefferson, at the end of the 1780s, lies in how precisely it tracks and explains the otherwise inexplicable situation in 1790 described above. It accounts for all the other extraordinary things that happened to her over the years. Hemings had a very serious role in life—and a personal identity that grew out of it—and she suddenly ceased to have that role and identity and took on new ones. She was Jefferson’s mistress, she had a baby, and she lost it. After that, she could do things for his older daughters, but she would never again be primarily attached to them.

That reality did not change. Years later, after Maria visited Monticello and needed to take an enslaved woman home with her to help with her infant for a time, she wrote to her father, then President Jefferson, that she had taken Hemings’s sister Critta with her, understanding that the companion of her childhood was not eligible for that kind of service.
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While Martha did end up living in Jefferson’s home permanently during his retirement years, at the outset of both his daughters’ married lives in the 1790s, he expected them to set up house with their husbands—not too far away from Monticello, he hoped—but away from it. Hemings, however, was supposed to remain tied to the mountain and to him. She was not going anywhere.

R
OBERT AND
J
AMES
H
EMINGS
had last seen New York when they were in the city just before James went to Paris. So they knew in general what to expect when they left Monticello with Jefferson on March 1, 1790. The three men started out with differing immediate destinations. Robert Hemings, with money from Jefferson, was to head for Alexandria to pick up horses and Jefferson’s phaeton, newly arrived from France. James Hemings, on the other hand, went to Richmond with Jefferson, who had financial affairs to attend to in the town. After several days, the pair boarded a stagecoach for New York by way of Fredericksburg, stopping in Alexandria to meet Robert Hemings. They planned to continue north in Jefferson’s carriage with the Hemings brothers alternating driving, and Jefferson perhaps taking the reins himself occasionally, because he liked to drive when he was bored or in a hurry.
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Their plan never materialized. A late winter storm blanketed Alexandria with a foot and a half of snow. After concluding that it was too dangerous to proceed on their own, Jefferson decided to ship the carriage by water, and the three men took a stagecoach with their horses being “led on” to New York. The trip sounds to have been beyond tedious: “The roads thro the whole were so bad that we could never go more than three miles an hour, sometimes not more than two, and in the night but one.”
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To relieve the boredom, Jefferson sometimes got out of the coach to ride one of the horses. The Hemings brothers probably did so as well, to find their own respite from the tedium. As they headed north, Robert Hemings was the advance man sent ahead—after Baltimore on to Philadelphia and then New York—to make arrangements for Jefferson’s arrival in each city.
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On the Philadelphia leg of the journey, Jefferson called on Benjamin Franklin. The great Philadelphian was gravely ill, and would die on April 17, a month after Jefferson’s visit. The last letter he ever wrote, in fact, was to Jefferson, answering his query about maps that had come up during their final time together.
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Robert Hemings almost certainly had at least seen Franklin many years before. He was with Jefferson in Philadelphia when he served with Franklin as a representative to the Continental Congress and wrote the Declaration of Independence. Though he knew of Franklin—practically everyone on at least two continents seemed to—it is less likely that James Hemings had ever encountered him. They were in Paris at the same time, but in deference to Franklin’s advanced age and status—and perhaps because he did not yet have a suitable residence for entertaining before Franklin left the country—Jefferson usually went to the elder man’s residence at Passy.
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There was no obvious reason for Hemings to have accompanied him on those journeys. After a short stay in Philadelphia, it was on to New York, where Robert Hemings was waiting for them.

Except for the surprise snowstorm, this was an altogether familiar situation. The Hemings brothers, one called home from his employment elsewhere, were once again compelled to travel with and serve Jefferson, as if time had stood still over the past five and a half years. One wonders how long it took the men to realize that things had changed; given all that had happened to them in the interim, they simply could not go on as they had before.

On the surface, James Hemings’s situation had changed the most. He was a long time away from the mental and emotional requirements of the slave society he had just returned to. Although he had certainly lived a larger life in that society than most enslaved males even before he left the country, his experiences in France made it even less likely that he could fit back into his old self in quite the same way. It did not help that the move to New York was so sudden. This was a dizzying turnabout for Hemings. He had been in America just a little over three months, and he had assumed, for some part of that time, that he was on his way back to France.

Robert Hemings had never left America, but the preceding five and a half years had brought him to a different point in life as well. He had spent those years living on his own, working for wages, and, unlike his brother James, creating a life apart from Jefferson. This was the longest period that he had ever been separated from him since they had known each other. He had become Jefferson’s traveling companion and valet when he was really a boy—only twelve. It is hardly speculative to say that he did as much growing up, and Jefferson did as much raising and training him during those early years, as he did being a real attendant to the much older man. He had known Jefferson primarily as a child or an adolescent would know an adult. Now, as they were back together in New York, he was a twenty-eight-year-old man with an adult perspective aided by the distance that Jefferson’s absence had provided. He had more than learned the lesson that he could do without the man who legally owned him. Indeed, he could do without any owner at all.

Nothing in Virginia’s slave society supported the way Robert Hemings had lived his life up until this moment, and much sentiment was against it. The pass system, which required slaves to have written permission to go out on defined missions or errands, was designed to maintain a nearly seamless connection between enslaved people and their legal owners. They were out for a specific purpose to go to a specific place, their very movements and use of time measured by the master’s instructions. Owners looked askance at neighbors who gave slaves open-ended passes that allowed them discretion and some measure of control over their time and physical space. That interfered with the goal of subordinating slaves to the will of the master, as much as was humanly possible.
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It was, in fact, impossible to achieve complete and uniform subordination of slaves on a societywide basis. They resisted that in myriad ways, and slave owners themselves were sometimes weak links in the chain. Men like Jefferson, because of their own personalities, quirks, and senses of entitlement, wanted to be able, within reason, to construct their personal lives as they saw fit. Jefferson’s way of life at Monticello called for a slightly different take on the master-slave relationship when it came to the older generation of Hemingses, particularly Robert and James. That he was also at a particular moment in his life—less rigid overall and caught up with his sense of himself as a leading man of progress living in a revolutionary era—no doubt shaped his views about how to deal with them. He did not have to be, or want to be, conventional in all aspects of his life. At the same time he clung to many of the comforts and verities of the patriarchal slave society that had formed him and shaped the contours of his own peculiar brand of unconventionality. Keeping the Hemings brothers in nominal slavery exactly fit his needs and self-image at the time. At various points in their lives, the two brothers were thus very much out in the world on Jefferson’s general pass, so long as they heeded his call to come home.
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Despite that figurative tether, those times away from Jefferson allowed—actually required—the brothers to develop identities that had nothing at all to do with him. They did things and went to places he knew nothing about—had friends, enemies, and lovers who were unknown to him. They used their general passes in the treacherous environment of Virginia to create dual roles for themselves as enslaved men and employees. The practice of hiring the slaves of other men and women became more prevalent as the institution grew and matured; it allowed less wealthy people who could not afford to buy slaves to rent them, giving them an economic and personal stake in slavery that they would not have had otherwise. Not everyone was happy about this. Prospective buyers were often reluctant to purchase enslaved people who had ever been hired out, thinking that the experience of working for wages—even when they did not keep them—made them questionable as slave property. The split in authority between the “true” master and the hirer weakened enslaved people’s links to both the idea and the fact of the primary master-slave relationship. It also highlighted their connection to free laborers. The two groups would inevitably compare themselves and see some points of commonality.
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Perhaps most ominously of all, hiring slaves out put a dollar value on their services, bringing home very forcefully to enslaved people (as if they did not already know this) that their labor had a specific economic value that could be determined. A hired enslaved carpenter knew that the hirer was paying his legal master for his labor. When the hire was over, he returned to his own home to do the same work. The value of his work, expressed by the hirer’s payments to the master, did not disappear; it was merely being captured by his legal owner, just as surely as his body had been captured and held by men with superior numbers and force. Frederick Douglass wrote passionately about the extreme indignity of having to give his legal owner the money he had worked so hard for during the times he was hired out.
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The Hemings brothers had even greater reason to question their position in the world and what Jefferson meant in their lives. Unlike Douglass and most other slaves who worked for men who were not their legal masters, they chose their own employers
and
kept their wages. They knew exactly what their labor was worth and were used to personally benefiting from it. They were the embodiment of all that the law sought to prevent: enslaved African American men who had some control over their time and labor. Living like this in the middle of a generally closed slave society could only have made them special people in their own eyes and in the eyes of other members of their extended family—especially the female members. The Hemings brothers modeled aspects of traditional masculinity beyond the physical. They worked and made money, like other men—money they could give to their mother and sisters, or the other women in their lives, if they asked for it, or if they simply wanted to give it to them. The men were both resourceful and resources. Given his early close association with Jefferson, Robert Hemings, in particular, could not erase the thoughts his long separation from him almost inevitably raised. Why should he continue to be bound to Jefferson when he knew he could function on his own as a wage earner?

Jefferson let the Hemings brothers go and come back to him over the years because he felt confident that he could count on their loyalty no matter what. He was wrong about that—or he and the Hemings men just had differing conceptions of what one could reasonably demand as a show of loyalty. Robert and James Hemings and the rest of their family were products of Virginia’s eighteenth-century slave society, before most slave owners adopted the strategically sentimentalized and self-serving notions of the master-slave relationship in the nineteenth century. Jefferson was somewhat ahead of his time in sentimentalizing his relationship with the Hemingses, for very obvious reasons. When he and other planters of his cohort called their slaves members of their “family,” they were speaking the implacable and unsentimental language of the patriarch describing all the people over whom they exercised power, as well as displaying their notion of responsibility. Slaves had not yet taken their place in the “family,” as they would during the antebellum period, as the adult “children” for whom some masters claimed they had feelings of love and impulses toward care. Southern members of the Revolutionary generation were firmly on the road to sentimentalizing their relations with slaves by the early nineteenth century; but during Jefferson’s most intense time with the Hemings brothers—1774 through 1794—that process was only newly under way.
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That word “family” did not have the same application for everyone on Jefferson’s plantations, because not every one of his slaves had true family connections to him. The young men traveling with him to New York to serve him there were actual, not metaphorical, family members—brothers to his dead wife and new mistress, and uncles to his children with Martha, as they were uncles to the child their sister already had or, more likely, was just about to bear. Jefferson had a degree of sentimentality toward them that grew out of all these ties that he did not have for other enslaved people on his plantations, and he evidently expected some reciprocity from these men and their other siblings in the form of love, gratitude, and attachment.
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Though the Hemingses and the Jeffersons were not the only enslaved and free families entangled by blood, it is probably true that few masters constructed their relations with their enslaved relatives as Jefferson did. From his place atop the pyramid, he could afford to indulge his sentimentality—styling himself as their “friend,” keeping their sisters out of the fields and in the domestic realm, borrowing money from the brothers and paying it back as if they were just friendly acquaintances—without diminishing himself in any discernible fashion. The way Jefferson treated the Hemings brothers, no doubt, made him feel good about himself. He did not have to do any of this, as he well knew. Having the Hemings men live this way served some affective need on his part, for this was not solely an intellectual choice. He was aware that the young men who traveled ahead to Rouen, Philadelphia, and New York to put his life in order for him, and who found work on their own and supported themselves as workers, did not really need to live under his wing. His inclination to give them freedom, coupled with a hesitancy to give them the full measure of it, was a function of the possessive nature he displayed in so many other contexts. They were to be slaves, but slaves to him alone, as if he thought that made their enslavement less of a problem for them.