The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (8 page)

The notations to the Lee family memoir are in two separate hands, the last paragraph added at a later date by someone who evidently wanted to give further details about just who the “Wife of Mr. Jefferson” was. The “authority” providing this information was most likely William Lee or one of his children, who were in good positions to know of Wayles’s origins. Lee, the father of Portia Hodgson mentioned in the note, married his first cousin Hannah, the daughter of Philip Ludwell III. William Lee’s mother, also named Hannah, and Philip Ludwell III were siblings. William Lee lived with his uncle Philip in London during the early 1760s. He was so devoted to him that he urged his own son, William Ludwell Lee, to drop the Lee name to preserve Ludwell for future generations. After Ludwell died, William married Ludwell’s daughter, and took charge of handling his father-in-law/uncle’s business affairs from London. He knew all the executors of Ludwell’s will—Wayles, Robert Carter Nicholas, Richard Corbin (related to the Lees by marriage), and Benjamin Waller. Indeed, Lee corresponded with Nicholas about various aspects of Ludwell’s business affairs in the years immediately following his death. It was, most likely, William Lee who arranged to have Ludwell’s will probated in England in 1767. After years in London, he returned to America in 1783 and became the master of Green Spring, living there with his son and daughters until his death. It would have been entirely natural for him to have mentioned to his children the link between Jefferson, by then a national figure, and their family.
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The references to Wayles appear in papers that were in the possession of the Lee family, with whom Jefferson had both bad and good relations. But they were really not about him. The information was included in the story of the Lees in order to memorialize one of their ancestor’s very decent and worthy contributions to an important aspect of “Mr. Jefferson’s” life in a way that put both Ludwell and Wayles in a good light. Though just a “servant boy,” Wayles deserved to be elevated: he had shown great promise and was extremely intelligent. Moreover, the Lee ancestor was astute and good-hearted enough to discern and want to cultivate that promise. The clear message is that, had it not been for Philip Ludwell III, there perhaps would not have been a John Wayles in America who was able to develop his talent and become prosperous enough to overcome his origins and produce a daughter for “Mr. Jefferson” to marry.

There was, quite simply, no more influential a man whom Wayles could have had as a benefactor than Philip Ludwell. Who but one from the highest ranks of society could have lifted him from the position of servant to a place where he could be the executor of Ludwell’s will, sharing that role with men who held extremely important positions in their society: Corbin, “his Majesty’s Receiver General,” Nicholas, “Treasurer of Virginia,” and Waller, who had represented James City County in the House of Burgesses and became the clerk of the General Court. Wayles must have been impressive, indeed, to have been given the chance to join men like that, although it has to be noted that, unlike those other men, he never held a position of public trust in his community. Instead, he worked with them to take care of Ludwell’s interests in Virginia after Ludwell decided to return to England permanently following his wife’s death, at the end of the 1750s. He and the other executors were to be the guardians of the Ludwell girls if they decided to return to America before they came of age.
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Several letters between Ludwell and Richard Corbin describe his partnership with “Mr. Wayles” on Ludwell’s behalf, usually overseeing the sale of tobacco. Corbin told Ludwell when he would be meeting “Mr. Wayles at Green Spring” to discuss business matters, and at one point he felt obliged to apologize after he “and Mr. Wayles” had made an “unlucky mistake” when handling a shipment of tobacco that had caused Ludwell to lose money. He assured Ludwell on behalf of both men that “an error of this kind [would] not happen again.” After Ludwell’s death, seven years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Corbin wrote to one of his daughters to tell her, “Mr. Nicholas, Mr. Wayles & myself proved your father’s will,” noting that “Mr. Waller” had not participated. There had been some disagreement about timing and process, and Waller wanted to take more time.
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When Wayles ceased to be connected to Ludwell’s household and started his career is unknown, but he made reference in a letter to traveling to other homes in the Williamsburg area in 1740.
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By this time Williamsburg had been the seat of colonial government for forty-two years. About five miles from Jamestown, situated between the James and York Rivers, Williamsburg was originally called Middle Plantation. In the earliest days it served mainly as an outpost that the settlers retreated to whenever they were attacked by the Native Americans upon whose land they were encroaching. As early as 1677, the year after participants in Bacon’s Rebellion had laid waste to “the state house and all other buildings at Jamestown,” Middle Plantation was proposed as an alternative to Jamestown as the seat of government. Another twenty-one years passed before that happened. In the intervening years work began on the establishment of the “free school and college” that became the College of William and Mary.
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When the statehouse at Jamestown burned again in 1698, Governor Francis Nicholson suggested, and the assembly approved, the transfer of the capital from Jamestown to Middle Plantation with the new name Williamsburg. One additional impetus for the move was “Middle Plantation’s exemption from mosquitoes,” which had plagued the settlers in Jamestown, an almost sea level swamp whose miasma took the lives of scores of immigrants before they figured out that it was not the healthiest place to settle. Unlike other parts of “Eastern Virginia,” Williamsburg with its higher elevation and different climate was said to be “wholly free from the pests.”
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The Williamsburg that Wayles encountered in the 1740s would certainly have been primitive by the standards of London. Even when Jefferson arrived there in the 1760s, the dirt roads tended toward dustiness or muddiness, depending upon the season. Most of the housing stock in the town was made of wood and painted white, although numerous buildings—the courthouse, prison, and some churches, as well as the residences of a few prominent people—were made of brick. All in all, the town was said to have made a “handsome appearance” and was considered by some a good place to live. It boasted a thriving merchant class and a vibrant commercial district, and a number of upper-class families made their homes there.
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William Gooch, already thirteen years into his twenty-two-year tenure as the governor of the colony, was well liked and respected by the inhabitants. The functions of government worked well for that period with the General Assembly, a legislature consisting of the House of Burgesses, comprising representatives elected from each county, and the Virginia council—twelve men from prominent families appointed by the king. True to its role as the seat of government, Williamsburg thrived on the presence of government officials and lawyers. Though the resident population of the town was around two thousand, it could rise to twice that whenever members of the assembly arrived to do business and when the courts were in session during the spring and the fall. Court days, especially, were times of great activity and importance, settling the affairs of individuals and reinforcing within the community at large a particular conception of the rule of law and order in that emerging society.
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Except for the symbols of royalty that were part of the day-to-day scene in Virginia—having a royal governor and references to a “king”—much about this world would seem familiar. The town had a college, the symbol of the will to and respect for education, a courthouse at which lawyers and litigants gathered before magistrates to provide for the orderly settlement of disputes, a governmental structure made up of an executive, a legislature, and courts—these are things that exist in the modern world. In fact, we pride ourselves on our present-day connection to these institutions and ideas, suggesting that they have helped create the best that we are today. There were, however, other features of the Williamsburg of John Wayles’s day that seem to belong to a different world.

The most striking aspect of Williamsburg that a traveler from modern times would note is that it was home to large numbers of enslaved people of African origin. Though the laws of Anglo-Virginians dominated, the face of Africa was as prevalent as the face of Europe. Afro-Virginians made up fully half of the town’s population, along with a small handful of free, often mixed-race men, women, and their families. These people, enslaved and free, performed a variety of tasks that put them on display as integral parts of the community. Walking through the streets of Williamsburg, Wayles encountered black people who were coopers, carpenters, blacksmiths, agricultural workers, and household slaves going to the market. Some of those blacks were born in America and spoke English as their native tongue. A good number of others had come from Africa, bearing the facial markings of their particular ethnic group, still speaking their native language to their fellows who knew it, while at the same time learning to speak the language of their Euro-American captors.

On court days, as an observer and participant, Wayles saw Afro-Virginians as the subjects of contract disputes between businessmen, as items of property fought over in contests over wills, on rare occasions as petitioners for their freedom, and as defendants in criminal actions that for whatever reason could not be handled by the plantation justice of an individual master. He knew that these people were the objects of law, but also outside of it in every way that counted.

Wayles could stand in Market Square and observe, or even participate in, public auctions of enslaved black people—some newly arrived from Africa or the West Indies, others who would be sold as “Virginia-born.” Perhaps he walked past homes where sales of blacks were carried out. In March of 1744 “at Mr. Vope’s door in Williamsburg,” a “young Negro wench perfectly well qualified for all sorts of Housework” was to go on sale. At the same event a “young Negro Fellow who under[stood] driving a chariot, and [was] most careful handling horses,” was to be offered for sale along with the horses for him to handle. In 1745 “a Parcel of Negroes, being about 16 Men, Women and Children,” were to be sold by John Brodie “at John Taylor’s house in Williamsburg.” These scenes played themselves out on a daily basis.
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In short, John Wayles had come to a world that held out the promise of enormous wealth and prestige for a few whites and was for blacks something of a living hell. No man in his position could have been more fortunate. He lived in the midst of, participated in, and benefited from what would become the largest forced migration in history—one that created a slave society that lasted another century and a quarter and a racial hierarchy that has yet to be fully undone.

John Wayles was thirty-one when he married Martha Eppes, the same age as Peter Jefferson when he married Thomas’s mother. Both men evidently wanted to establish themselves before they took on the important role of husband. Wayles was already a member of the establishment by the time he married, for he had been admitted to practice in the county courts in April of 1741, just a few years after his arrival in the colony.
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This fits very much with his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson’s description of him as an amiable man who flourished in his law practice, not because of his intellectual command of the law, but because of his hard work and appealing personality. Having Philip Ludwell in his corner was actually the main thing. We see some of Wayles’s disposition and the way in which he gained acceptance in his surrounding community in the letters of Maria Byrd to William Byrd III in which she refers to Wayles’s efforts to find suitable speakers for their church. In a 1760 letter Byrd wrote, “Mr. Wayles is extremely kind in doing what he can in that respect, he has engaged Parson Masson already and designs likewise to get Parson Duglish, he says to make us laugh.”
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Byrd also noted that attendance at church had been falling off and that Wayles and “Co. Harrison” and “Will Randolph” were making efforts to get “Parson Kenney” to come to preach. Wayles’s and Byrd’s interactions at church were apparently commonplace. In the preceding year she reported that during the “very last Sermon Sunday Wayles comes to our pew before Church began & says Madam I give you joy of Mr. Byrd’s being made Governor of Pittsburgh.”
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Though Wayles’s supreme act of reinvention has become the quintessential American story, he effected this transformation long before Americans started glorifying such feats. The preference for leaders born in log cabins, or from otherwise humble origins, came into vogue during the age of Andrew Jackson, who ushered in the era of the common man. With the support of a prominent mentor and the sheer force of his personal will, Wayles made a place for himself in Virginian society that he could never have made in Lancaster.

Will alone is not enough. One must have the opportunity to exercise it. Virginia’s burgeoning commitment to slavery, driven by the tobacco economy, created the environment that gave Wayles the chance to make his fortune. He was very much involved in all parts of the institution, from its most public aspects to its more hidden and private ones. Regarding the public face of slavery, not only did Wayles own slaves himself to work on his farms, but he also served as a broker who helped others buy slaves. He acted as a plaintiff’s attorney in a case that divided slaves among several members of a slave-owning family. He served as executor for a number of estates in which slaves were sold to pay debts. Numerous ads in the
Virginia Gazette
of the 1760s track his activities along these lines. His name appears most often for domestic sales of slaves in which he and other lawyers represented clients who wanted to sell their human property.
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