The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (81 page)

By the end of the 1790s, Callender’s sharp pen and criticism of the Adams administration got him sent to jail in Richmond under the power of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson resolved to pardon everyone convicted under the law when he became president. Callender had served his term before Jefferson took office and had to pay a $200 fine. Jefferson ordered the federal marshal David Meade Randolph, brother-in-law to Thomas Mann Randolph, to give Callender back his money. Randolph hesitated, infuriating Callender, who perversely saw Jefferson as responsible for Randolph’s behavior. He grew angry when Jefferson failed to answer one of his letters and demanded a patronage job—postmaster of Richmond. Even as he seethed about the perceived ingratitude of Jefferson and the Republicans—he really had suffered for doing their bidding in the climate of the Alien and Sedition Acts—he decided to give himself insurance. After his release from jail, he went to Charlottesville to find out if the hints in the newspapers about Jefferson and an enslaved woman were true. He also made inquiries in Richmond.
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When Jefferson learned of Callender’s rising anger, he thought additional money might mollify him. It did not. He wanted to be postmaster of Richmond, the only thing that could repay him for the time he had spent in jail for having roasted the Republicans’ enemies in the pages of the
Richmond Examiner
and his other publications. Callender went to Washington and met with James Madison, but the meeting satisfied no one. When told of this, Jefferson sent his secretary Meriwether Lewis, of later Lewis and Clark fame, with an additional fifty dollars to give to Callender, along with a promise to help him get reimbursed for the fine he had paid. This inflamed him further, for he now realized that there was no chance that Jefferson would give him a job in his administration.
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Callender’s fine was repaid, but his rage was now out of control. He felt used, and that was not all. James Callender’s hatred of blacks was full-blown and vicious. He was genuinely horrified that the man who had once been his hero and benefactor had an African American mistress and children by her. Jefferson, a traitor to the white race, had been unworthy of his respect from the beginning. In his fury, Callender sought to humiliate Jefferson by making Hemings a special target, when she had not done anything to him at all. As noted earlier, Callender had made part of his career in Richmond excoriating the white men of the town for being involved with black women. He claimed then that he was concerned only about married men who were committing adultery, giving a pass to bachelors. Despite what he said, the passion he repeatedly brought to his denunciations and the things he said about black people in general make plain that it was interracial mixing, not adultery, that really infuriated him.
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Jefferson had been a widower for two decades. It is highly unlikely that he ever frequented Charlottesville taverns and dances with Hemings or took her to the theater, like the men of Richmond whom Callender assailed. Jefferson and Hemings’s world was private. Her life centered on caring for his rooms and his belongings—a space Jefferson guarded closely. Although she may have traveled to Philadelphia, Washington, and Poplar Forest, in all events she was strictly of Jefferson’s domestic world. Not that consistency would have mattered to Callender, but his attack upon Jefferson the bachelor and Hemings the completely private person made no sense, given his earlier posture about attacking only married men who publicly broke their marriage vows.

There is no record of what Jefferson ever said to his white family about Callender’s writings in 1802, and no record of what the Hemingses thought. Just as Jefferson’s white neighbors knew about the exposure of the relationship, members of the enslaved community knew as well. The only question that any of these people could have had at this point was what Jefferson would do next. This crisis had implications for his public and private lives, the former more than the latter. For most people who did not live at or in the environs of Monticello, this was a revelation. For the people who lived there, it was not. By the time of Callender’s exposé, both the Hemings and the Jefferson families, and other relatives close to them, had had at least twelve years to adapt themselves to Sally and Thomas’s lives at Monticello. They did it in the way that all families, at one time or another, are forced to deal with potentially embarrassing situations involving their loved ones; they closed ranks. One of the great strengths (and great weaknesses) of the institution of the family is that family members protect or, depending upon the situation, cover for one another. Members are anxious, sometimes to the detriment of themselves or other individuals in the family, to present a united and, usually, positive front to the outside world.

If one were to drop down into the middle of any seemingly bizarre family situation, one would wonder how these people could possibly live in those circumstances. The people living in it, however, would have had years to fit themselves into whatever strange configuration one found them in. A thousand tradeoffs, exchanges, and accommodations would have been made, completely away from the view of outsiders. The family adjusts and endures. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it had no choice.

Slavery simply provided families in the South with many more ways to be bizarre than in regions where it never took hold or was abandoned early on. Fathers owning sons, brothers giving away brothers as wedding gifts, sisters selling their aunts, husbands having children with their wives and then their wives, enslaved half sisters, enslaved black children and their free little white cousins, living and playing together on the same plantation—things that by every measure violate basic notions of what modern-day people think family is supposed to be about. This was one of the myriad reasons why slavery was a horrific thing. These weird family situations actually violated emerging norms for the family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is why southern whites of that time worked so assiduously to hide this aspect of southern life.

One of the more difficult things for modern-day observers to accept is that Jefferson’s daughters knew of his relationship with Hemings, in much the same way that their mother was said to have lived with John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings without knowing they were having multiple children together. The people of their time, however, at least the ones who wrote about it, absolutely assumed that these women knew. In fact, much of the commentary about Jefferson and Hemings dwelled on his daughters’ likely feelings about this over the years. Their contemporaries never entertained the notion that the women of the household did not know what was going on in their own houses. They understood their community and its mores, and knew that such situations were not uncommon. Martha and Maria’s father’s fame and position in society could not protect their family from things that were endemic to the institution of slavery.

Jefferson’s white daughters, like white women all over the South in their time, were expected to adjust to the men in their lives, not the other way around. They loved him dearly, and would not have stopped doing so for any conceivable reason—certainly not for having a mistress. It is hard to see through the heavy prism of the Victorian age that followed Jefferson’s time, but celibacy was not an expectation among the people of the eighteenth century. Martha and Maria could no more force that on their father than they could have made him marry a white woman he did not want to marry, a thing that would have been to their distinct disadvantage anyway. After the deep disappointment in the 1790s, described earlier, when her father-in-law remarried and destroyed her chance of becoming the mistress of Tuckahoe, Martha Randolph had lived a somewhat unsettled existence, moving between Monticello, Eppington, Varina, Belmont, Edgehill, and, finally, back to Monticello.

The Randolph-Harvie marriage was a socially acceptable union that had been, in fact, personally disastrous for Martha and her children, who would have grown up in and inherited the grand house Tuckahoe, had Thomas Mann Randolph not remarried. Maria Eppes, who married in 1797, was in a much more stable situation with her husband and lived about a hundred miles from Monticello. By the time Callender began ranting about Hemings, these women had likely made all the necessary adjustments. Sally Hemings was a woman they knew, their mother’s half sister with whom they had grown up. This was in all ways a family matter, and, as so often happens, they may have resented the intrusion of outsiders more than what was going on in their family. What neither Martha nor Maria had bargained for, however, was that Jefferson’s decision to return to public life would result in making their privately made accommodations about their family life known to the world.

As for the Hemingses, all they could do was watch and wait to see whether this new public phase would compel Jefferson to make a change. Would Hemings and her children remain at Monticello and things continue as they had, would Jefferson simply end their association, or would he send her, Beverley, and Harriet away? Following so closely upon James Hemings’s heartrending death, the family must have felt that a plague had been visited upon them.

W
HEN
J
EFFERSON WENT
to live at the President’s House in 1801, he took no member of the family who had been the most intensely involved with him for the preceding twenty-seven years. Hemingses probably visited him, including Sally, for there was periodic traffic between Jefferson’s two households during his eight years in Washington. At least every six months, David Hern Jr., an enslaved man at Monticello, traveled to the capital and back, carrying letters, plants, new horses for Jefferson, and other items. Even Robert Hemings, who had been with the new president at the start of his national career in Philadelphia in 1776, may have come to see the man with whom he had spent so much time and who was now at the pinnacle of his power. But the closest the family came to having a full-time representative there was Edith (Edy) Hern Fossett, the fifteen-year-old who came to Washington in 1802 to be an apprentice cook to Honore Julien, the man who had taken the job that Jefferson had originally intended for James Hemings. Sometime in the early 1800s, perhaps before she left Monticello, she married Joseph Fossett, the son of Mary Hemings. This Hemings in-law would remain at the President’s House for six years.
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Jefferson never gave a good account of why none of Fossett’s relatives by marriage were chosen for her assignment, or to work alongside her in other capacities. When he was governor of Virginia, he took almost his entire household staff to Williamsburg and Richmond. Although he did not repeat this when he went to Philadelphia as secretary of state, he had a good reason. His daughters were still living on the mountain. Martha and her husband had yet to settle into a habitable place, and Maria would not join him in Philadelphia for several months. Both Jefferson daughters were married by the time he became president, and the Hemings women were in “idleness” at Monticello when he was away.

Jefferson did give an explanation of sorts for his choice when he expressed his preference for having white servants in the President’s House. It was easier, he said, to sever ties with them were they to “misbehave”—an odd statement, given the facts of life in his Washington household. He actually had a number of black servants there, enslaved and free, and it is unfathomable that he really believed that Peter, Sally, and Critta Hemings, and Betty Brown, or any of the younger generation of Hemingses, for that matter, would have behaved so atrociously in Washington that he might have wanted to “exchange them.” As for Peter Hemings, we have no reason at all to think that his evidently agreeable personality made Jefferson leave him at home. There was likely something else. While he enjoyed Peter’s cooking and thought highly of him overall, he apparently did not believe James’s younger brother his equal in talent and, thus, up to the task of being chef in the President’s House. There is no hint that Critta Hemings ever gave anyone a problem, and the few reports of Sally Hemings give the impression of a sweet and reasonable person. Betty Brown may have been another matter. A Jefferson granddaughter at one point described her as being “a greater virago than ever,”
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suggesting that she had been one for a long time, but Brown was not so much trouble that Jefferson made any move to get rid of her. She did have small children, but Edith Fossett and Frances (Fanny) Gillette Hern, Fossett’s sister-in-law who joined her in Julien’s kitchen in 1806, would have small children, too. Between the two of them, five youngsters were born in the President’s House, including James Fossett, evidently named for Joseph Fossett’s tragically lost uncle.

Why Jefferson did not bring Sally Hemings to Washington on a full-time basis is obvious. Living with her anyplace other than Monticello would have caused all sorts of complications, not the least of them cute babies running around who looked just like him. And having a woman in the President’s House whom he favored, but who lacked the recognized power of a wife, could have created all sorts of jealousy and tension among the domestic staff—the kind of thing Jefferson sought to avoid at all cost. This was particularly so since at least five white women—the wife of Jefferson’s chef, the wives of two other servants, and two laundresses—lived at the President’s House. Each of the wives, at various times, worked for Jefferson, too.
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This was the largest group of white women at any of Jefferson’s residences when he was in public life. There had been one female cook at the Hôtel de Langeac before James Hemings took over as chef and before Sally Hemings arrived. There was, of course, the ill-fated Mrs. Seche, the wife of his coachman in Philadelphia who had tangled with Adrien Petit, whom Jefferson had brought all the way from France to be his housekeeper. The presence of five white women, and the children of one of the women, changed the usually male dynamic of Jefferson’s away-from-Monticello households, and one suspects that the situation would have been potentially volatile had Sally Hemings and her sisters lived in the President’s House.

Jefferson’s white daughters had grown up with the Hemings women and were used to their special status. Their family history allowed them to put these women in context. Very importantly, they had the luxury of viewing them from their positions as the unquestioned mistresses of Monticello whenever they were in residence. The middling and lower-class white women in Jefferson’s presidential household could have had no ingrained understanding of how these women fit into Jefferson’s world, and no firm basis for security about their status in his eyes. There would almost inevitably have come a moment when Jefferson would have had to arbitrate some dispute between these free white women and the enslaved African American women whom he had encouraged all their lives to see themselves as having a special relationship to him. Mrs. Seche’s dispute with Petit, and the trouble it caused Jefferson, comes most immediately to mind as an example. There Jefferson was forced to choose between one servant to whom he had long-standing ties and another who was only recently of his world. Petit was nowhere near as close to Jefferson as the Hemings women. If they had been mixed in with his Washington “family,” and he made the wrong choice about one of them, an “anti-Hemings” choice, he would not only have upset his household in Washington; the hard feelings would have traveled all the way back to Monticello. There were always benefits and burdens to having his household staff on the mountain composed of one family. Whatever he did for, or to, one member would be known and judged by the others. Under the circumstances it was far better to have a staff made up of people who were on relatively equal footing in terms of their associations with him.

A complement of reasons, of varying strengths lay behind Jefferson’s choice to leave the Hemingses at home when he went to Washington. His evolving sense of himself and his position in the world also influenced his relationship to the family. Jefferson had been remaking his image from the time he was elected vice-president in 1796. With his ascent to that office, the age of the plain, austere Jefferson had arrived, and he carried it through his presidency and beyond. Much has been made of his shift from the somewhat Frenchified southern aristocrat, to the plainly attired, unassuming embodiment of republican simplicity and virtue, his straight hair undressed and unpowdered. Was it all an act, an example of Jeffersonian duplicity and hypocrisy? If it was an act, it was a useful one. Politics is theater, and the successful politician is the one who can skillfully bring just the right symbolism to the cultural and political moment at hand. Jefferson understood that political power was shifting to the so-called common man, and that it was therefore critical to do away with the most obvious trappings of Old World elitism.

Even as his Federalist opponents ridiculed this new homespun version of Jefferson, the voters took to it. They were not dumb. They knew he was a wealthy man compared with them, but they apparently appreciated that he at least made the effort to appear as one of their own—thus acknowledging that they were the country’s political future. This cost Jefferson little, as his new persona easily took him into what today would be known as shabby chic—like the modern-day trust funder so confident in his social position that he uses duct tape to wrap up his worn docksiders when he could easily buy a thousand new pairs. Certainly the Federalists ultimately did themselves no favor by making sport of Jefferson’s attempts to appear in solidarity with the common people. The fun all ended for them, of course, with the election of 1800.

This new incarnation of Jefferson not only affected his public conduct but also altered the way he deployed his personal servants. Members of the Hemings family, and others enslaved at Monticello, had been the most obvious evidence of his high position in society. What could have been more elitist than having Robert and then James Hemings following him about as his manservant? In later years his grandson-in-law Nicholas Trist, in keeping with that generation of the family’s habit of saying things about Jefferson’s life that were patently untrue in order to control his image, claimed that Jefferson “usually” did without a “body servant.” According to Trist, his famous in-law followed the motto that one was “never to allow another to do for you what you can do for yourself.” It was, therefore, Trist explained, “incompatible with the sentiment of Manhood, as it existed in him, that one human being should be followed about by another as his shadow.”
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Leaving aside the fact that Jefferson could probably have handled a plow as well as—and probably better than—many of the men
and
women he had tilling his fields, Trist’s statement erases significant portions of the life and efforts of Jupiter Evans, Robert and James Hemings, and Burwell Colbert. All of these men were, at one time or another, Jefferson’s body servants. Evans and the Hemings brothers were before Trist’s time at Monticello, but he knew that Colbert was, in Jefferson’s later years, virtually his “shadow.” The notion that Jefferson had no use for such things was born in the 1790s, and with it came a change in the trajectory of his life with the Hemingses. There were still other factors.

As many historians have also noted, Jefferson’s overall attitude regarding slavery underwent a subtle shift after his return from France. The young man who had been very vocal, for one of his station and place, on the subject of emancipation, fell pretty much silent from his middle age on. In earlier times he had spoken of legislated gradual emancipation when the idea was anathema to the overwhelming majority of his class cohort, and while in France he contemplated importing German workers to live and labor at Monticello along with slaves who would be freed and transformed into something akin to European tenant farmers. In a letter of 1789, he wrote,

Jefferson ceased such talk in the 1790s. He was a national figure with his base in Virginia, where there was no strong clamor for abolitionist politics at any level of white society. Actually, no clamor existed at the national level either. Despite his protests to the contrary, once Jefferson saw in the early 1790s that his vision for America after the Revolution might actually be thwarted by Hamilton and his followers and what would become the “Federal party,” there was really little chance that he was going to walk away from politics altogether. Although he wrote to others about his seeming contentment during his first retirement, he later confessed to his daughter Maria that he had been deeply unhappy for long stretches of time during that period.
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He loved Monticello, but he simply did not find enough there to occupy his time, particularly when there were really pressing things he wanted to have happen on the national political scene. Jefferson was not ready for retirement until he had been in the position to try to accomplish what he thought should be accomplished for the United States. His election in 1800 allowed him to do that. Building the nation was Jefferson’s true obsession, not the end of slavery and definitely not the racial question.

As he retreated from the antislavery rhetoric of his youth, and grew comfortable in his role as the champion of the common man (the common white man), Jefferson, like others of his type, began to accommodate himself to the institution of slavery. As was discussed earlier, Lucia Stanton has detailed his plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory. He also brought in overseers who eschewed violence in favor of incentives as a way of motivating enslaved workers; for unexplained reasons, however, the men did not remain in his service. Jefferson was again, in all of this, ahead of his time—on the leading edge of adopting the sort of paternalism that would in the coming decades turn his white grandchildren’s generation into full-throated apologists for the peculiar institution.

One of the signs of the change in Jefferson is that he never again put an enslaved man from Monticello in the position that Martin, Robert, and James Hemings occupied. Their relative freedom in the 1770s and 1780s made sense in the heady days of the American Revolution and the pre–Saint Domingue early American Republic. Jefferson was not inclined to free these men totally—he never really wanted to let go of anyone who had ever been close to him—but they were able to move about as if they were free. This cannot have been a matter of his greater affection for these three men than for the ones he encountered later. There is no reason to believe that he felt closer to Martin Hemings than to Burwell Colbert. He probably liked him less, but he gave the elder Hemings a much wider range of operation than he did Colbert, who was thoroughly of the home.