The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (77 page)

Why, however, would Jefferson be thinking of William Beverley and his Treaty of Lancaster in the summer and fall of 1797 while he was at home with Sally Hemings when she was pregnant with Beverley? Several months before he returned to Monticello that July, Jefferson saw an item in a newspaper written by Luther Martin, a prominent Maryland Federalist, that riveted his attention. In the published letter, Martin attacked Jefferson for having written in the
Notes
that a Colonel Thomas Cresap, “infamous for the many murders he had committed” of Indians, had killed the family of the great Indian orator Logan. Martin charged further that Logan had never made the speech, ridiculing Jefferson’s alleged credulity for believing that the Indian was capable of having done so. For the rest of 1797 and into 1798, Martin printed letters addressed to Jefferson in the papers, hoping to draw him out.
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Martin had launched a serious two-pronged assault upon something that Jefferson held dear, for
Notes on the State of Virginia
presented Jefferson the philosopher, scientist, and historian commenting as an expert on his beloved Virginia. This was his personal masterpiece.

Jefferson would later claim that he had read only the first part of Martin’s first letter, which may have been true or been simply his way to be grandly dismissive of his critic. Either way, the attack galvanized him and sent him to his research. After checking his own material, he began to write to others who might have information that would clarify matters.
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Luther Martin had impugned his scholarship, but he had also, probably inadvertently, done something else. He opened the door to the lost world of Peter Jefferson and, as it turns out, John Wayles. In the latter half of 1797, Jefferson stepped through that door into the past. The Treaty of Lancaster, ironically concluded on July 4, 1744, produced a deed recorded in the proceedings of the Virginia Executive Council, and Jefferson had copies of Virginia’s laws and documents at Monticello, which he consulted regularly when he was governor of Virginia.
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Along with William Beverley’s name, the deed contained the signature of the man who witnessed the signing of the treaty, Philip Ludwell Lee, the nephew and namesake of the man who had brought John Wayles to America. There was also the signature of the secretary of Virginia, Benjamin Waller, Wayles’s old business partner and George Wythe’s law teacher.
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Both of Beverley Hemings’s grandfathers had associations with men who had helped make the Treaty of Lancaster for Virginia.

The man responsible for setting up the treaty negotiations, who was originally set to represent Maryland and whose name was mentioned in the published proceedings of the treaty negotiations, because his property was a boundary line for the land subject to the document, was none other than the Indian trader and Indian fighter Colonel Thomas Cresap. Martin conveyed some of this information to Jefferson in January of 1798 in one of the eight letters he addressed to him on the Cresap matter over the span of several months—letters in which he lectured the author of the
Notes on the State of Virginia
, in a somewhat patronizing way, about the Six Nations, the Treaty of Lancaster, and other aspects of Virginia history.

If Jefferson truly never allowed himself to look at Martin’s letters, he missed the specific reference to Cresap and the treaty. But it is almost inconceivable that Jefferson did not already know of the connection. Cresap was famous in Maryland and Virginia as an Indian fighter, a mapmaker, and a correspondent of Virginia governors and other Virginia officials. He was intimately involved in Indian affairs and disputes between the English and the French throughout the mid-1700s. Cresap’s property bordered Indian territory. He had a trading post, sometimes called a fort, on the Great Wagon Road, which carried white settlers south and into what would become West Virginia. That pathway is also marked on the Fry-Jefferson map, adjacent to Beverley Manor, which the road cuts right through. A dispute about the treatment of Indians at Cresap’s trading post was another impetus for the summit in Lancaster. There were always clashes at the border that threatened to erupt into serious confrontations. When the contest between the French and English entered this volatile mix, it led to the French and Indian War.
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After the Treaty of Lancaster putatively secured the western lands, Cresap helped form, and became an agent for, the Ohio Company along with Thomas Lee, Lawrence and Augustine Washington (George’s brothers), and others. He and Christopher Gist, whose work influenced Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, became the faces of the Ohio Company. The company’s purpose was to sell land and settle the Ohio territory, and it had a competitor in the form of the Loyal Land Company, an entity created by a number of prominent Virginians, including Peter Jefferson, Joshua Fry, Thomas Walker (Peter Jefferson’s friend and physician), and the Reverend James Maury, Jefferson’s teacher when he was a boy. Several principals of the company became Thomas Jefferson’s legal guardians upon his father’s death, in 1757, and later his mentors throughout his early career.
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Martin had an interest in what Jefferson had written about “Colonel Cresap” because he was married to the daughter of Michael Cresap, Thomas Cresap’s son. Only Michael Cresap could possibly have been near Logan’s family at the time of their deaths. As far as Martin was concerned, Jefferson had libeled his wife’s father, though that appears to have been a pretext for attacking Jefferson. For his part, Jefferson had been clear from the beginning: if he had made an error in the
Notes
he would do a new edition and correct himself. As his research showed very quickly, he had, in fact, mistaken Colonel Thomas Cresap for his son Captain Michael Cresap. Even further, the evidence indicated that Michael Cresap had not personally murdered Logan’s family, although Jefferson believed that his actions had led to the slaughter. After his intensive investigation, Jefferson wrote an appendix to the
Notes
removing references to Cresap as “infamous” for many murders and as the murderer of Logan’s family. He did not change the language in Logan’s speech saying that a “Colonel Cresap” had killed his family, nor did he back down from his view that Logan had actually given the oration.
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It can be said in Jefferson’s defense that there was often a very fine line between being an Indian fighter and one who was infamous for murdering Indians. Thomas Cresap did have the reputation that Jefferson charged him with, even though he was not involved in the murder of Logan’s family.

It is extremely unlikely that any of these events would have been known to Sally Hemings in 1797 without Jefferson’s mentioning them to her or that she would have cared enough about William Beverley to feel that Beverley was a more suitable name for her son than James, Robert, Martin, or Peter. The pattern of her children’s names suggests that she was not in control of this process: Jefferson was. He was not present for Beverley Hemings’s birth on April 1, 1798, having returned to Philadelphia at the end of December, as Luther Martin continued to harangue him about Cresap and Logan. By the time of Jefferson’s departure, however, Hemings was well along in her pregnancy, past the point where the two would have discussed what to name their coming child. If it was a girl, Hemings would know what to do: name her Harriet after their daughter who had recently died. Jefferson had done this before, naming one daughter Lucy Elizabeth after an earlier daughter who died. The same had happened with his granddaughter Ellen Wayles, born in 1796, who was the second of that name. In fact, when Hemings and Jefferson did have another daughter who survived infancy, she was named Harriet. We cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that these two communicated with one another even when Jefferson was away.

But what about a boy—what would be a suitable name for Thomas Jefferson’s first son? In truth, Beverley Hemings could not have had a more appropriate name. His younger brothers, Madison and Eston, would be named for important people in Jefferson’s daily life. William Beverley, whose services to Virginia had suddenly been brought back to Jefferson’s attention in 1797 by the Cresap matter and the need to revise
Notes on the State of Virginia
, represented ideas in Jefferson’s head about the future of his country. Even Beverley, Virginia, laid out by Peter Jefferson, and Jefferson’s patrimony from the town were connected to a notion of the future. Beverley Hemings wore the name of the man who had helped open the west to Virginians, perhaps his father’s greatest obsession. This little boy, the most mysterious of the Hemings-Jefferson children, grew up passing through the foyer where his grandfather’s map was prominently displayed, memorializing both William Beverley’s name and his treaty. Did his father ever point this out to him? Did Beverley understand what the west meant to his father? Beverley Hemings would not, as an adult, join the throngs of people, black and white—his own younger brothers included—who made their way west to settle land “bought,” stolen, and wrested away from the Six Nations and other groups like them. Instead, he would remain safely ensconced on the eastern seaboard, after leaving his mother and father to move into that other brave new world, the world of American whiteness.

T
HREE MONTHS AFTER
Beverley’s birth, a perhaps unknowingly ironic comment on the event arrived at Monticello. Jefferson received what has to count as one of the most extraordinary letters in all of his correspondence—a bolt seemingly out of the blue that appears to have stunned him. It came from his protégé and dear friend William Short, who was still in Europe. The two men had kept regular contact from the time Jefferson departed France, talking politics, family, and careers. There is no indication, as of this date, what Short knew about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. The letter he wrote to his mentor that winter, however, shows that he would not at all have been disapproving of their connection, at least not because they were of different races. In fact, the interracial aspect of it may have greatly pleased Jefferson’s “adoptive son.”

Until he became totally disillusioned later in his life about his countrymen’s views of black people, and the possibility of ending slavery and making blacks citizens, Short sincerely hoped for the abolition of slavery. Evidently influenced by his time as minister to Spain in the mid-1790s, he had an epiphany: intermixture between the races offered the best possible solution to America’s racial predicament. He wrote to tell Jefferson this at the end of February 1798. Short was well familiar with the position Jefferson had staked out in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
, so he understood he was going against the grain in advancing this proposition. While making subtle references to Jefferson’s expressed views, indeed using echoes of Jefferson’s own language—for example, “deep rooted prejudices”—to press his point, Short gently offered his friend a way out of his announced position, presenting reasons to break free from the habit of racial prejudice. Taking great care, he noted that while some of “the most enlightened & virtuous minds” (read Jefferson) expressed negative views about the idea of racial mixture, there was still much to think about before the country closed off that option because of its supposed “evils.”
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Short, who almost certainly knew of the Hemingses’ connection to the Wayles family—his double in-laws—reminded Jefferson, as if he needed reminding, that racial intermixture was already prevalent within their slave society. He went on,

This utterly astounding passage has a prominent eighteenth-century white Virginian extolling the beauty that could be produced by the mixture of black and white—beauty, he said, that equaled the combination of “the rose & the lilly.” Short knew the exact significance of his choice of words, for this was a direct challenge to some of the best-known of Jefferson’s passages in Query 14 of the
Notes
, which is why he tiptoed so gingerly. Short was speaking of Frances Bland Randolph Tucker, the mother of John Randolph of Roanoke and wife of St. George Tucker.
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As far as we currently know, Frances Tucker was not part African American, but in Short’s view she looked more like a black person than many mixed-race people he had seen. His willingness to use concrete examples to illustrate the soundness of his proposals about racial mixture could only have set off warning bells in the ultra-sensitive Jefferson. This was approaching ground he did not wish to cover. Although he lived daily surrounded by mixed-race slaves, Jefferson was careful
never
to personalize his comments about “amalgamation,” to speak openly about the lives and family histories of the people he knew best. If Short was willing to talk about the beauty and virtues of a named upper-class white woman who was darker than some black people, might he not, if the conversation went any further, begin to speak of the beauty and virtues of black people who were almost as white as some white people—James and Sally Hemings, for example. For Jefferson to get a letter like this, just months after the birth of his mixed-race son, was quite remarkable. What on earth had prompted Short’s declaration about the positive good of mixing races at that moment? Was he baiting Jefferson because he knew something about his life, or was this merely a spectacular coincidence?