The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (64 page)

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T IS NOT
clear exactly what Robert Hemings was supposed to be doing in New York, and whether he was really expected to have a long-standing formal role in Jefferson’s household there. His brother was set to continue his job of several years, being Jefferson’s chef. The most natural thing for Robert Hemings to have done was to reassume his place as Jefferson’s valet, and that was probably his job at first. Curiously enough, that job did not entail shaving Jefferson, even though Hemings had been trained years before as a barber and Jefferson expected his manservant to shave him. Instead, Jefferson paid another man for shaving him during that first month in the city. Hemings may have been out of practice.
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There is some irony in this, for Jefferson had arranged to have Hemings trained as a barber while waiting to go to France.

The brothers’ formal roles were not their primary focus in May, their second full month in the city. Jefferson fell ill with one of his periodic migraine headaches at the very beginning of the month, and they directed their energy toward taking care of him. Although he described the attack as moderate, Jefferson’s letters indicate that he was actually quite debilitated. Illness kept him pretty much housebound during the entire month and prevented him from writing any long letters—both serious matters for this normally energetic and communicative man. At the end of one shortened missive to his son-in-law, he described his “eyes” as being “too weak to” continue the letter. For most of this period, the brothers were Jefferson’s main companions on a daily basis, nursing him to the extent that was needed, taking his orders, and running errands for him throughout the city.
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There were many things in Jefferson’s life that might have brought on one of his stress-induced migraines, not the least of which is that he had just taken a serious position in a new government. He was still getting reaccustomed to being “home,” that is, in the United States, but not the home that mattered to him most. He was reacquainting himself with America in an American city he despised. There was, too, the situation at Monticello with Sally Hemings, and the fact that he had recently and abruptly given a daughter away in marriage. Neither of his daughters had written to him since he left Monticello at the beginning of March—an almost two-month interval that must have seemed endless to him. Everything about his circumstances made him vulnerable to a physical breakdown. Robert Hemings went out to get his medicine and to pay the doctor he consulted. Peruvian bark (quinine), the usual remedy for his migraines, did not work this time. The headache, and the Hemings brothers’ care of him, persisted.
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Robert and James Hemings were not alone in making Jefferson’s life run as smoothly as possible. Through the fog of sickness, he managed to hire two additional people to work with them: Jacob Cooke to be a “house servant” and François Seche to be a coachman. This was in preparation for his move to the house at 57 Maiden Lane, which he had arranged to rent early on. These two men arrived in May, when the Hemingses and Jefferson had been in the city only a month and a half. It may have been clear by that time that Robert Hemings would not be staying, since Cooke and Seche seemed to combine the roles that he normally played. Did Jefferson really need a chef, a coachman, a house servant, and a separate manservant? He was long used to having help, but his recent experiences at the Hôtel de Langeac had accustomed him to a very high level of personal maintenance. Even with that, the house on Maiden Lane was the very opposite of the Hôtel de Langeac—“small” and “indifferent,” as Jefferson described it to his son-in-law and daughter, respectively. It was not the kind of place that really needed a large staff of servants to care for one person. There were, nevertheless, four by the time the Hemingses and Jefferson moved in at the beginning of June.
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That number diminished by one just several days after the move to Maiden Lane. Robert Hemings left New York for Fredericksburg to try to find employment there. Getting a paying job was not the only reason he wanted to go. While living in Fredericksburg on his own, he had met and married a woman named Dolly, and he wanted to be near her. Like so many enslaved women who married men who lived on other plantations or in nearby towns, Dolly Hemings was left alone to wait for Robert to visit whenever he could arrange it. The couple may have already had both of their children, Martin and Elizabeth, named for Robert’s older brother and mother, respectively. Up until this time, Dolly was in a somewhat better position than other enslaved women because, for most of the time she knew him, her husband was at liberty to come and go on his own, and had disposable income to support their family. They now faced an unprecedented situation: her husband, off playing some ambiguous role in Jefferson’s life, was well out of range for anything approaching a normal schedule of visits. No wonder Robert Hemings wanted to leave. Jefferson agreed to let him go, gave him money for his expenses back to Virginia, but held him to the same terms that always applied: Hemings was to tell whoever hired him that he would be available only until the time that Jefferson returned to Monticello and called him home. Sometime around June 7, Hemings set off. He had his reunion with Dolly in Fredericksburg, but whatever prospects he thought he had there did not materialize. So he went to Williamsburg and took a job working for a man named George Carter, going about his business while waiting for Jefferson to send for him.
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Hemings’s desires to be with his wife and to find paid work are completely understandable. Why he had to leave New York to be able to do either one is less clear. Jefferson had no apparent problem paying the Hemingses wages. He paid James and Sally Hemings in France, and he paid James Hemings a salary in New York. It should have been possible to come to terms with Robert. Hemings’s actions over the next few years provide a clue: he seems to have preferred working for people other than Jefferson. This may have influenced his choices about Dolly. As far as we know, he never made a move to have her join him at Monticello or in New York, for that matter. This is quite interesting, given that Jefferson bought the spouses of slaves whom he barely knew in order to reunite them with their families. It is hard to imagine that he would have refused a request from Robert Hemings to do the same thing. Dolly could have done housekeeping for Jefferson in New York or at Monticello. It is possible that the reticence about Dolly’s joining him stemmed not from Hemings but from Jefferson. Perhaps Jefferson, French in so many ways in these years, had the same attitude toward the Hemings brothers as some members of the French upper classes who did not allow their household servants to marry. A servant with a spouse necessarily had divided loyalties: family concerns competed with the master’s. Dolly Hemings’s presence would have changed the dynamic between Jefferson and Robert Hemings, particularly since she was an outsider to life on the mountain and had not grown up knowing Jefferson and understanding the system he had established there.

Jefferson apparently did not think he was in great need of Robert’s services in the household. By early April, just two weeks after they arrived in New York, he wrote to William Short, who was still living at the Hôtel de Langeac, asking him to implore Adrien Petit to come to New York to take over the running of his household.
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If Petit agreed, which he eventually did, that would bring the total number of servants to five. Petit was used to running a much grander household, and with James Hemings, Cooke, and Seche on hand, and with all the washing for the household being sent out, matters could be very much under control without Robert Hemings.

After his brother left, James Hemings was solely responsible for handling the household expenses and making sure the domestic affairs were in order. As he could easily have expected, he soon had to do that in a house that was under construction. Jefferson, as always, immediately began a plan of remodeling the small house he had moved into; he put in a gallery and had cabinets and bookcases made. The bookcases alone cost more than a whole year’s rent. His books were not even there yet, which distressed him greatly, but he was determined to be ready for them when they arrived.
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The two men settled into a period of intense involvement in a relationship whose characteristics differed markedly from those of any of its earlier incarnations. Jefferson’s memorandum books for the rest of his time in New York tell a fascinating story of the daily exchanges between the two; they contain at least one reference to Hemings, giving him money for himself or some other purpose, almost every day.
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With the household staff small compared with the one at the Hôtel de Langeac, and Jefferson’s life less complicated—in Paris he had a wider array of cultural and social activities to spend money on—Hemings suddenly looms as a larger figure in the written record. He had always been close to Jefferson, but before going to Paris and while in the city, he was either surrounded by his brothers and sisters or was just one of a number of other French servants. This was yet a different turn in his connection to Jefferson, the first time he served as a paid employee to him in their native land.

Although his interactions with Jefferson were the most regular of all the employees at the house on Maiden Lane, Hemings was not the highest paid among them. That distinction belonged to Seche, though the gap between him and Hemings was much smaller than the one between Hemings and Cooke, the house servant. Apparently coachmen on both sides of the Atlantic were more highly paid, for Jefferson paid his coachman in France more than his cooks.
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Whenever Hemings did anything in addition to cooking, such as “painting a shelf,” he was paid. Even this does not really convey the total value of Jefferson’s terms with the young man. Unlike his white servants, whose contracts expressly stated that they had to buy their own clothes, Jefferson continued to buy clothing for Hemings and to give him spending money—“necessaries for himself”—in addition to the wages he paid him.
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The steady salary put Hemings in virtually the same position that he had had in France in regard to salary, and it probably went a long way toward assuaging any disappointment or anger he felt about not returning there. He was in a somewhat better position because no servant was “above” him. He was in charge of the New York household. There remained the matter of formal freedom. There is evidence that Sally Hemings had a deal with Jefferson but no written reference to a specific “deal” between James Hemings and Jefferson upon their return to America has surfaced. Hemings’s actions in France, and his sister’s, suggest the existence of a joint agreement between the siblings to try to stay there. Just as Jefferson came to some understanding with Sally Hemings about coming back, he must have had some discussion with James Hemings. His treatment of Hemings in New York and Philadelphia, and the details of the written agreement they ultimately did make, suggests that the two had an understanding about Hemings’s eventual freedom before they left France. The complicating factor was that Jefferson had brought Hemings to Paris to make him his French chef and had spent a good deal of money on the young man’s apprenticeships. He felt Hemings owed him for that. From our modern view, we could easily see that Hemings had probably more than paid for his apprenticeships during the years he worked for Jefferson for nothing. That was not Jefferson’s sense.

Had Hemings remained in France, and worked for someone else, he could have repaid Jefferson in currency. He could have done the same if they had returned to France, by coming to some arrangement about his salary, working for nothing until the “debt” was discharged and then remaining in the country when Jefferson went home. Jefferson, however, did not want money from Hemings. He wanted a French chef at Monticello. The only way for Hemings to adequately “repay” him was to go back to Monticello and train someone there—which is what he eventually did. George Washington’s invitation to Jefferson to become secretary of state delayed their reckoning on this matter. Hemings’s training of his replacement would have to wait until the end of Jefferson’s stint in the new American government, which he thought would be relatively short.

Hemings was not in New York long. Three months after they arrived, Congress voted in July to move the capital to Philadelphia for ten years until a new one could be established on the Potomac River. This was apparently the result of a deal between Jefferson and his soon to be great rival Alexander Hamilton, with an assist from James Madison. One says “apparently” because neither Madison nor Hamilton ever wrote about what happened the night the bargain was made. But relying on the explanatory power of Jefferson’s story—the way his recollections help make sense of the relationship between the placement of the capital and the adoption of Hamilton’s program, historians have generally accepted that the famous “Dinner Table Bargain” was just as Jefferson described it.
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The details need not detain us here, but the historian Herbert Sloan cogently explained the essence of the matter: “to break the deadlock over Alexander Hamilton’s [very ambitious] financial program, and, more important, to end the threat of disunion, Jefferson and Madison agreed to provide the additional votes necessary to pass the assumption of the state’s debt and, on his side, Hamilton helped to arrange for the votes needed to place the permanent capital on the banks of the Potomac.”
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Foreshadowing the famous strategic political dinner parties of his presidency, Jefferson invited Hamilton and James Madison to his home for dinner to discuss the issue. Over Jefferson’s good wine and the meal James Hemings prepared for them, the men discussed the fate of the nation’s capital, coming to a compromise that Jefferson later regretted. Hemings had seen James Madison in Jefferson’s home before and would do so many times again. Alexander Hamilton was more likely a new face to him. Over the course of the next few years, especially in Philadelphia, where Jefferson and Hamilton grew ever more hostile to one another, Hemings probably heard the name Hamilton quite a bit, though in tones less friendly than the ones likely used during that fateful evening in Jefferson’s home.