The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (80 page)

James Hemings “tragical end” often appears in Jefferson scholarship as a cautionary tale, and a not so subtle justification for Jefferson’s failure to free his slaves.
See, if he had freed more of them, they would have all gone crazy and killed themselves
. It is also framed as a matter of failure on Hemings’s part. He was given a chance, and because he was not truly prepared for freedom, he failed. If he was not prepared, then none of Jefferson’s slaves was prepared. In the end, not freeing them was a true blessing.

It is entirely possible that when James Hemings’s African grandmother was being transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the West Indies, or directly to Virginia, she shared a vessel with other Africans who made the choice to jump overboard rather than live in the world that their European captors had planned for them. The vast majority did not make that choice. If we feel compelled to think of the captives’ differing reactions in terms of strength versus weakness—and it is by no means clear we should—it makes more sense to speak of the uncommon strength of the people who stayed alive than to speak of the “weakness” or “failure” of those who could not endure what no human being was supposed to endure.

Hemings did not experience the Middle Passage. But he did live in a society that treated him and others like him inhumanely, with no clear prospect of changing that in his lifetime. How does one rest comfortably in such a place? How could Hemings, who had seen the world and knew a great deal of what was in it, without guilt, move ahead with a family forcibly held back? Five years after his death, Hemings’s home state would pass a law providing that black people emancipated in Virginia would have to leave the state within one year or be reenslaved unless their owners petitioned the government to allow them to remain. Some masters did that, and in other instances the law was ignored. But that official show of contempt for a people who had built Virginia from its earliest days says volumes about the world Hemings lived in. He carried this extra burden along with all the normal struggles that attend human life.

Even outside of Virginia, there was no place in the United States where Hemings and his extended family would have been treated as full human beings. There probably was no place in the Western world where that could have happened, though he had lived in a city that offered at least some breathing room. Hemings might have lived longer, had he and his sister taken the chance to work together to build a life in Paris. Though racism was alive and well in France, there was a substantive difference between the treatment of mixed-race people there and their treatment in the United States. That did not change the condition of the entire race, but the extra social space might have made a difference to an individual as sensitive as James Hemings. By the end of his life, starting over in Paris was a moment that had passed. There would have been a great difference between putting down roots there in 1788 or 1789 with a sister who could have helped pay the rent and make a home and stepping alone into the uncertainty of postrevolutionary France.

That said, it is also true that Hemings had lived with all the problems of being black in America up until that moment. How did he become so despairing in the fall of 1801 that he felt he simply could not draw another breath? What comes immediately to mind is the missed opportunity in Washington. It appears that he did want to be chef de cuisine at the President’s House all along. That he left his job and came back to Monticello shows that he had no deep animosity toward Jefferson. When this episode began, he was working in a Baltimore inn, a place that provided a living, but where he had no prospect of doing the kind of cooking that he had been trained to do, and had done, in Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and Monticello. Jefferson might have been casual and republican about his attire during this period, but he spared no expense on food and wine. He spent a fortune on both during his time in the President’s House and was said to have set one of the best tables in the country. Had he accepted Jefferson’s offer, Hemings would have been in charge of all this, but his hesitancy had destroyed this opportunity. There was no way to fix things. Jefferson was not going to fire Honoré Julien and his wife, who had both left Philadelphia to come work for him. Hemings had missed the chance of a lifetime.

The bungled job negotiations were important. But other, more serious underlying problems haunted Hemings. Depression and suicide are complex phenomena, even with the medications we have today. Predispositions to either can be exacerbated, or ameliorated, by circumstances that are often out of one’s control, and it seems as primitive to think of this in terms of weakness or failure as to believe that the mentally ill are possessed by evil spirits. Enslaved people suffered from depression and sometimes committed suicide, as did free blacks. Even prosperous free whites, to the bewilderment of those around them, sometimes killed themselves when they came to believe there would be no awakening from whatever nightmares had seized their minds. Hemings’s life was probably more difficult because he had no wife and family to succor him and to support in return. He seems to have been on his own—alone—in the most profound way. With that said, the fact is that the personal demons, or physiological idiosyncrasies, that drove Hemings to kill himself will remain unknown to us.

The record on James Hemings goes poignantly silent after the final letters about his death. We do not know whether his family sent for his body and had him buried in the slave cemetery at Monticello or whether he rests in a grave in Baltimore. The person who lived in Jefferson-related documents as “Jame,” “Jim,” “Jamey,” or “Gimme,” from the time he was a small boy, formed no part of the stories Jefferson’s white family left for posterity. He first appears in Jefferson’s memorandum books as “Jamey,” a seven-year-old enslaved boy given a small sum of money by the man who had just married his half sister and owner. Isaac Jefferson remembered him as “Jim,” a teenager riding on horseback to Williamsburg with the family of the newly minted governor Jefferson in the midst of America’s Revolutionary War. Then he was the intrepid “James” traveling on his own to Rouen, France, to find accommodations two days after he and Jefferson had arrived in that country. Adrien Petit, whom he met in France and who was probably the first white person he had worked with as an equal, knew him as “Gimme” as they collaborated on two continents to run Jefferson’s household. We do not know what his sister Sally and the rest of his family called him—though “Jimmy” seems a good bet, the French Petit not likely to have derived “Jimmy” from “James” without having heard him called that. We do know, however, that he and his name were cherished. The name James was given to several nephews and passed down the family perhaps long after all memory of the man had been lost. Besides that, and a few of his recipes preserved at Monticello, his chief legacy is his story. James Hemings’s was a singular life: an eighteenth-century Afro-Virginian who lived abroad in France, who was passionate and intellectually curious enough to hire a tutor to teach him to speak and think in a different language, who was literate, who became a chef de cuisine, who negotiated his freedom, and who continued to journey far and wide after he became a free man. Surely it broke his family’s hearts to lose him.

Exposure

“It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY.” With those words published in the September 1, 1802, issue of the
Richmond Recorder
, James Callender opened the door to Sally Hemings’s world at Monticello, or at least the world as he chose to portray it.
²⁰
It had been almost thirteen years since she and her brother had returned to Monticello. James was tragically gone. The first anniversary of his death loomed, and this now twenty-nine-year-old mother of two faced a crisis that her sixteen-year-old self could never have imagined when she came back to America with Jefferson. She had no doubt expected a private life. This was exposure in the most public and hostile way. The cruelty Callender directed toward her continued over the course of several months.

Callender’s informers were Jefferson’s neighbors in Charlottesville and people in Richmond, and one gets a sense from what he got right and what he got wrong how familiar his informants were with life at Monticello. In his original piece he spoke of Hemings’s and Jefferson’s “son” “Tom,” who was “ten or twelve years of age.” He also said that Hemings had gone “to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters.” In his column of September 15, he mentioned that she had five children.
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His next piece revealed that a man in Richmond had “bet him a suit of clothes or any sum of money” that the story was true, but pointed out that Callender had made an error in his first story: Hemings had not gone to Paris with Jefferson but traveled later.
²²
Of course, that man clearly was not talking off the top of his head, for that was a specific detail about a long-ago event that no one could have guessed. The next column purported to correct information about Tom’s age. “He is not
big enough
at least our correspondent thinks so, to have been in existence fifteen or sixteen years ago. Our information goes to twelve or thirteen years (emphasis in original).”
²³

Sally Hemings did not have five children in 1802. She had, however, given birth five times, but three of her children had died. The people talking to Callender may have been close enough to know when she got pregnant—there would have been reason to gossip about that—but were not closely following her children’s lives after that time.
²⁴
The mountain was full of fair-skinned enslaved children of all ages, some of them Hemingses who probably resembled one another. Who from the outside could, or would want to, be keeping track of who belonged to whom?

One strongly suspects that Callender’s informants actually told him that Hemings had lost children, and he simply felt that saying Jefferson had five children with an enslaved woman sounded better than just two, for that clearly established the relationship as long-standing. What seemed to bother him, and later commentators who joined in, was the apparent stability of the relationship, which suggested that Hemings was something like a wife to Jefferson. That, they believed, was an insult to white women, for this was, in modern terminology, a zero-sum game. If he chose to live with a particular African American woman, that inevitably meant he rejected all white women. Awful as he was, Callender was no fool. Telling his readers, in the midst of articles meant to be jeering and hostile, that Hemings had once had five children, but that only two survived, might actually have triggered some empathy with her. Nearly all of his readers would have known someone who lost a child, or lost one themselves, in a world where diseases carried away the offspring of all classes and races. Only the lowest of the low could have failed to sympathize with a mother who had endured such losses.

As his biographer Michael Durey pointed out, Callender had a particular penchant for exaggeration, a not unhelpful trait for a polemicist. At one point he said that Hemings had up to thirty “gallants of all colors.”
²⁵
Five or six would not have been enough; she had to have thirty of them in
all
colors. He dubbed Hemings and Jefferson’s purported eldest son “President Tom” and made him an important part of his series—President Tom who bore “a striking, though sable” resemblance to Jefferson, President Tom who was “putting on airs.” It was the perfect way to ridicule Jefferson, a child with his same name, a sable Tom Jr. who strutted about full of himself—showing the clear dangers of racial intermixture. That’s what happens when you mix the races, he was saying, you get these ridiculous creatures who do not know their place. Not one of the other supposedly five living children was ever mentioned. Neither four-and-a-half-year-old Beverley nor the infant Harriet could have served Callender’s needs so well.

Callender’s discussion of President Tom indicates that his multiple informants were, in a somewhat confused way, trying to fix Hemings’s first child’s age and, thus the beginning of her relationship with Jefferson, by reference to her trip to France. They were simply going on when they remembered Hemings’s first child was born—when the gossip started—sometimes mixing up when she went to France with when she returned. That is the reason for Callender’s language in his “correction” of himself, saying that Tom was not “big enough to have been in existence “fifteen or sixteen years ago.” Using fifteen or sixteen years as a marker for this child’s “existence” would have taken things back to around 1787, when Hemings had gone to France. Of course, she did not have a baby when she went there. She had her baby when she returned. Had that child lived, he or she would indeed have been twelve years old.

Hemings could have expected the usual run of gossip about her and Jefferson. As the mistress of the plantation owner, she would have had all eyes fixed on her—the eyes of the enslaved, as well as any others who knew of her circumstance. She could not have expected to have her name in the newspaper with a virulent Scotsman branding her a “slut as common as the pavement,” suggesting that she lived in the pigsty at Monticello.
²⁶
His hatred for her was unreasoning and unbounded. Why? And why had Jefferson brought this man into her life, anyway?

The basic outline of Jefferson’s history with Callender is straightforward and familiar. He noticed Callender’s undeniable talent for polemics during the mid-1790s and thought the ardent Republican might be useful in his struggles with the Federalists. Callender had shown that he was willing to go to almost any length to hurt those with whom he disagreed—a trait that should have given Jefferson pause about getting involved with him. Unfortunately, it did not. The 1790s for Jefferson was life during wartime. The Federalists had to be stopped no matter what. To all appearances, Callender was a comrade, and Jefferson optimistically (naïvely) thought their shared political beliefs a sound basis for a connection in times of war. Callender would only go after those whom he was supposed to go after—the much hated Federalists. Although Jefferson later played down the closeness of their connection, his early financial support of Callender, and encouraging words and gestures, put him into the position of being something of a mentor to him.
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Being mentor to James Callender, however, was like walking a cobra on a leash. Jefferson never had any reasonable prospect of knowing when Callender might turn on him.