The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (74 page)

Several of Elizabeth Hemings’s grandchildren worked in the nailery, though they split duties between there and the house—Joseph Fossett, the brothers Wormley Hughes, Burwell and Brown Colbert, and James (Jamey) Hemings, son of Critta Hemings. When they were not working in the house—doing what besides occasionally breaking china is not clear—these first cousins joined other boys churning out thousands of nails a day. One thinks of Dickens and the children he wrote of trapped in the nineteenth-century workhouses that sprang up to power the Industrial Revolution. There was no sense, in settings rural and urban on either side of the Atlantic, that the children of the laboring classes should be spared work. In fact, they had long been a part of the nail-making trade. In England boys and girls started at age seven in nail factories, bringing home whatever they could to support their families. Indeed, some of the children working in Jefferson’s nailery looked very much like their English counterparts. Joseph, Wormley, Burwell, and Brown, and their other cousins, were almost certainly among the children whose appearances stunned noted Europeans who visited Jefferson in the 1790s. One, the comte de Volney, observed upon seeing them that they were “as white as [he was].”
¹³

Nail making was boring and repetitive work at Monticello, performed cooped up for as long as twelve hours a day under strict supervision. George Granger’s son, George Jr., was the foreman, but Jefferson involved himself directly in the daily work of the factory, counting the nails (which he probably enjoyed very much) and noting how many nails each boy produced and how much nail rod he wasted.
¹⁴
In keeping with his plan of increasing productivity through incentives, boys who performed well were given extra rations and more expensive clothing. Jefferson was thinking about the present and the future. Measuring these boys’ performances, and giving them rewards for good ones, led to more nails immediately. It also told him what kind of men they might become, and how they would later fit into his plans for operation at Monticello. Isaac Jefferson, brother of the foreman, remembered that he and the other boys were allotted “a pound of meat a week, a dozen herrings, a quart of molasses, and a peck of meal”—twice the weekly ration for field hands.
¹⁵
George Granger, the only enslaved adult associated with the nailery, received one-sixth of the yearly profits of the operation.

This third generation of Hemingses represented a departure for the family. But for those members who were leased out during Jefferson’s time in France—an anomalous situation—these youngsters were the first Hemingses employed in a form of labor specifically designed to bring income and profit to Monticello. Their aunts and uncles had all been personal servants to the Jeffersons, making their lives run more smoothly, but neither planting crops nor producing items for sale. Family-based connections would continue to matter, but this new generation of Hemingses, particularly Joseph and Wormley—and we may say John Hemings—were valued on the mountain not just because of who they were but because of what they produced.

Elizabeth Hemings

One important person was not at Monticello when James Hemings returned in 1794: his mother. At some point after 1791, Elizabeth Hemings went to live at Tufton, one of the quarter farms at the southern base of Monticello. No reason for the move has been found, but it suggests that by this time Hemings—approaching sixty—no longer had regular duties in the mansion. Enslaved women who grew too old to be productive in whatever tasks they performed when young often looked after the children of mothers at work in the fields. One of the enduring mysteries about Hemings’s life is just what her actual duties had been, apart from motherhood and her connection to John Wayles and Martha Jefferson. Her eldest son had been the butler, the person traditionally in charge of supervising the household staff. Was Hemings, in deference to her age and status, a sort of über housekeeper, looming over all her children and ultimately responsible for the efficient running of the household? Or was she called into action to help her daughters only when required?

While the written record of Elizabeth Hemings’s life at Monticello is frustratingly unrevealing, the archaeological record is rich and informative. At least since the 1970s, historians have recognized the critical role that archaeology can play in the study of American slavery. As the historian Patricia Samford put it, “[a]rchaelogical study of the detritus of daily life can provide a perspective on African-American life generally absent in the documents—the perspective of the enslaved themselves, visible through the structural footings of their homes, the broken ceramic bowls from which they ate their food, and the objects they used to give spiritual meaning to their lives.”
¹⁶
The head of the archaeology department at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Fraser Neiman, and others have done extensive work at the site where Hemings lived after she came back to the mountain in 1795 and, perhaps, before. That work, combined with the documentary record, tells us a great deal about the way the matriarch of the Hemings family lived.

Hemings’s residence must be considered in the context of the natural and planned landscape that surrounded her. Monticello was segmented by four roads, which Jefferson called “roundabouts,” circling the mountain “at roughly constant elevation.” The roundabouts were, in turn, linked to roads of varying slopes. This “internal transportation system” was both practical and aesthetic.
¹⁷
Jefferson viewed the roundabouts, along with the replacing of wooden fences with peach trees and a sunken fence (the ha-ha!) to cordon off fields and gardens, as part of his overall effort to create an ornamental farm. Beauty, rather than utility, was the main consideration.

The first roundabout enclosed the Monticello mansion and Mulberry Row, the area where Hemings’s children and grandchildren lived. The second “encircled the kitchen garden and orchards planted on slopes just below the mansion.” The third and fourth roundabouts “marked a transition zone between the ornamental and agricultural precincts of the Monticello Mountain landscape.” It was in this zone, about “thirty feet south” of the third roundabout, that Elizabeth Hemings lived, situated somewhat apart from her children, and even farther from most of the currently known residences of other enslaved laborers.
¹⁸
A dense forest has reclaimed the spot today, but in her time the area was largely a cleared grass field interspersed with large trees. Her known neighbors were Robert Bailey, a Scot who served as the head gardener at Monticello during the 1790s, and “William Stewart, a white blacksmith from Philadelphia,” who came later.
¹⁹
The composition of Hemings’s “neighborhood” shows the problem with seeing slavery through the eyes of twentieth-century residential Jim Crow and displays the eclectic nature of Monticello’s residents. A part English, part African enslaved woman lived next door to a Scot, and a white family who hailed from the North. A native of Italy, Antonio Giannini, a gardener at Monticello before Bailey, had relayed to Jefferson in Paris Elizabeth Hemings’s message that her daughter had died.

There is little written record of what social relations were like in this multiethnic world. Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen focused on sex, painting a picture of easy sexual relations between the enslaved women at Monticello and Jefferson’s “Irish workingmen.”
²⁰
Sex was not the only, or even the main, thing that linked them. Work was the focus, performed by blacks and whites while they shared the rituals of life in what was essentially a small town of around two hundred people. Jefferson’s white workingmen taught enslaved people crafts and skills—some to Elizabeth Hemings’s grandchildren. Wormley Hughes learned gardening from Bailey, and Joseph Fossett learned blacksmithing from Stewart, whom Jefferson pronounced “the best workman in America, but the most eccentric one.”
²¹
He drank, not exactly unusual in those days, but Jefferson put up with the drinking because he was so gifted.

There is little doubt that, had she wanted to, Hemings could have lived in the midst of her children and grandchildren. By this time, however, she had been mother and grandmother to many. Peace and quiet, in a place of her own away from the demands of family, may have been her preference. She was not so far away that she had no easy access to her family, but she was at enough of a distance that some effort had to be made to visit. There was at least one other advantage to her location. Her living area was “at least ten times that of the people living along Mulberry Row.”
²²

Hemings’s dwelling fit the pattern of late eighteenth-century housing for enslaved people. Just as agriculture in Virginia was undergoing transformation, slave housing was changing as well. For most of the century, enslaved people lived in “‘barracks-style’ housing,” with others who may or may not have been related to them. The floors of these houses featured numerous subfloor pits. These pits served as storage spaces for people who had no closets or trunks in which to keep their possessions. Being open, the pits left the contents visible to everyone—which was apparently the point. Each resident knew the other’s pit and what was in it. That social knowledge, and the morality that grew up around it, worked as a check on theft among coresidents. The changing demographics of slavery—ratios of males to females became more equal, and slaves began to form families—caused a shift in housing patterns. Individual family dwellings replaced barracks, and subfloor pits disappeared. In keeping with this trend, Hemings, living alone, perhaps with containers for her possessions—had no subfloor pit.
²³

By modern standards, Hemings’s house was almost unimaginably small—roughly 170 square feet. There is no evidence of a wooden floor, though she did have at least one glass window. The house was actually at the smaller end of the range of the typical square footage of slave quarters in Virginia—“from 144 to 672” square feet.
²⁴
The size of slave housing depended, at least in some instances, on the number of people in the residence and the preferences of slave owners. Expectations about space and privacy were very different from our own, as were understandings about the usages of living space. For enslaved people there was, evidently, little sense of the interior of the home as a place where one spent much time, work being the center of their lives. For most of her adulthood, Hemings’s daily life took place in John Wayles’s house and, later, in Jefferson’s. Her own home was primarily a place to sleep. Parlors, dining and sitting rooms, and multiple bedrooms were found in the homes of the elite, although even there people, including adults, were often expected to share bedrooms and beds. Because their houses were so small, Hemings and other enslaved people typically socialized, cooked, and took meals outside. One imagines that her large yard area, somewhat removed from the eyes of Jefferson and his family, was often a gathering place for the Hemingses.

Hemings and other enslaved people were not the only ones who lived in extremely tight quarters. A 1785 survey of one Virginia county showed that “more than 75 percent of the [white] settlers surveyed were living in one-room homes of less than 320 square feet.”
²⁵
Though whiteness and free status gave them a tremendous social advantage over blacks, the material lives of nonelite white Virginians were much closer to those of blacks than to those of people like the Jeffersons. Not only were their houses small; the homes of poor whites and even “many middling planters of English descent” had dirt floors and no glass windows.
²⁶
One can well understand the deep resentment, even turmoil, this bred in them, for although they enjoyed the benefits of their society’s enforcement of white supremacy, they were unable to rise, and Virginia’s political system was designed to keep it that way. The extremely conservative state constitution, which Jefferson abhorred, left a full two-thirds of the white male population without the vote because of its stringent property qualifications.
²⁷
Virginia’s poor and middling whites, the sort who would be working for Jefferson and living among the Hemingses, were in a worse position politically than their counterparts in other states. For example, Tennessee’s constitution, which Jefferson lauded as the most perfect in the new union, provided for universal male suffrage in 1796. Even free black males could vote in the state until a constitutional convention in 1834 took the right away.
²⁸
Thus, for roughly fifty years, free blacks in Tennessee (admittedly few in number) had the right to vote when large numbers of free white men in Virginia did not.

Archaeological work also allows a comparison between Hemings and her closest neighbor, William Stewart, that sheds additional light on her life. Both she and Stewart lived in log cabins “seated on a dry-laid stone foundation.” Stewart’s place was much larger than Hemings’s, with almost “four times the floor space.” Neiman suggests the difference cannot be attributed to the fact that there were seven people in the Stewart household, while Hemings lived alone. The residents of Mulberry Row had families, too, and their houses were smaller than Stewart’s. The reason for the difference, of course, is that Stewart was a free white man, and the market created an incentive for Jefferson and other employers to give him and other white workers, particularly skilled ones, the best housing they could provide. If they did not, the workers could take their services elsewhere.
²⁹

Both Hemings and Stewart participated in the market and consumer revolution that took place in the latter half of the eighteenth century when Americans developed an unquenchable thirst for the imported British goods that filled country stores and vendue markets, which the historian T. H. Breen describes as a “combination of modern flea market and wholesale auction.” Peddlers, “mysterious and ubiquitous,” traveled the countryside introducing people in isolated rural communities to “the pleasures of owning an ivory comb or colorful piece of ribbon.”
³⁰
Hemings, for example, accumulated a good quantity of consumer goods. She had creamware, pearl ware, and Chinese porcelain. This was not uncommon in the Chesapeake. Visitors to Washington’s Mount Vernon remarked upon the incongruity of seeing china in the mean cabins of the enslaved. Slaves acquired these goods through different means, and the dating and usage gives clues as to how they obtained them. Evidence of heavy usage and old-style patterns suggest that much of the china in slave cabins consisted of castoffs from their white owners.
³¹