The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (84 page)

Jefferson gave in to Hemings’s ultimatum because he could see the reasonableness of it. He was not at all happy about what Lilly had done, though it would take a demand for a too steep raise in wages to make him get rid of Lilly the following year. This situation, however, threatened domestic harmony at the most intimate level—down to the bedroom, and Jefferson had to do something. James Hemings was the child of the valued house servant Critta, the namesake of her tragically lost older brother, the nephew of Jefferson’s mistress and of men who had been his personal servants, the cousin to his children Beverley and Harriet, and the grandson of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles. He and his first cousin Burwell Colbert had been nail boys together, the two very youngest in the group, and may have had a special connection. What would Burwell Colbert think of this? All these multiple identities shaped the way Jefferson saw what Lilly had done. The Hemingses, naturally, had every reason to despise the overseer and could only have been up in arms about the brutality he meted out to their young relative. Jefferson’s initial resolution of this conflict acknowledged his own concerns, but also preserved his relations with the Hemings family and maintained the atmosphere he had created on the mountain. Harmony and efficiency were his constant watchwords.

Jefferson showed this in another violent episode involving a member of the Hemings family that happened just the year before the Lilly-Hemings confrontation. In 1803 Brown Colbert, Burwell’s younger brother, was almost killed by a fellow worker in the nail factory. The eighteen-year-old Colbert, who apparently had a mischievous streak, had been teasing Cary, another youth. Seeking “a most barbarous revenge,” Cary took a hammer, approached Colbert from behind, and “struck him with his whole strength.” The blow fractured Colbert’s skull, sending him into convulsions and then a coma.
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There must have been chaos on Mulberry Row as word quickly spread of what had happened. Even minor head wounds are notoriously bloody, and this could only have presented a grisly and terrifying scene. Colbert underwent an operation to remove parts of his skull that had lodged in his brain, a horrific thing to contemplate given the medical knowledge and almost total lack of sanitary conditions of the day. One hopes that he was still in a coma when the operation was performed because those were the days before anesthesia. Jefferson’s son-in-law Tom Randolph, who reported this to him, claimed to have assisted in the very complicated operation. He also had Cary put in jail.

The attack made Jefferson livid. He told Randolph to leave Cary in jail and then issued what has become one of the most often quoted passages in scholarship about his attitude toward slaves and slavery. “It will be necessary for me to make an example in terrorem to others in order to maintain the policy so necessary in the nail boys.” He wanted Cary sold farther south or “in any other quarter so distant as never more to be heard of among us. It would be to the others as if he were put away by death.”
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This heated response, born of Jefferson’s obsession with maintaining order among his workers, and his use of the words “in terrorem” and putting Cary “away,” as if he had died, have shaped the presentation of this episode in Jefferson scholarship. What is not considered is what this event signaled to the Hemingses as well as to other members of the enslaved community. Cary had not struck out at his real oppressors, the people who were enslaving him or even the brutal overseer, Lilly. Cary had almost killed one of their own, and he had done so not in self-defense but out of anger over a childish prank. As far as every enslaved person knew after this episode, Cary was the kind of person who might inflict a mortal wound upon his fellow slaves if they angered him. There is no reason to suppose that any enslaved person at Monticello, besides Cary’s most extreme partisans, would have failed to see the gravity of his transgression or focus on Cary’s banishment to the exclusion of thinking of the young man he had almost killed, and what the near loss of him meant to his family and his community. Why would the Monticello enslaved community be sanguine about having to live with a would-be murderer in their midst, or ever want to run into him anywhere in the immediate vicinity? Cary had to go. Colbert recovered, but did not stay on the mountain very long. Two years later he asked Jefferson whether he could be sold so that he could live with his wife, who had a different owner. Decades later he would go even farther away from Monticello, leaving Virginia entirely for Liberia, where he and other members of his family would perish while hoping desperately that they had finally found a promised land.

James Hemings’s interaction with the violence of slavery, followed by his half year in freedom, left him determined not to return to Monticello. After agreeing to Hemings’s condition about being removed from Lilly’s oversight, Jefferson told Oldham to put Hemings on a stagecoach and send him home. Oldham relayed Jefferson’s direction, and Hemings seemed agreeable to it, but he then asked whether he might take a moment and go to see his uncle Robert. Oldham agreed, and the young man never returned. The last reported sighting of him during this period was on a boat on the James River.
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Whether he went to see his uncle is unknown.

What happened next, or what did not happen, is revealing. Jefferson simply let him go, a response that reiterates that not all enslaved people were the same in his eyes. Even though the multiple associations mentioned above did not prevent Jefferson from holding Hemings in slavery and making him work cooped up in a plantation factory ten hours a day, they did shape his reaction when the young man ran away after being beaten within an inch of his life. Lilly was notorious for using the whip, and had Jefferson freed every slave his overseer abused, he would have lost a good part of his work force. In his brutal treatment of James Hemings, however, Lilly had overstepped a serious boundary, and Jefferson made amends for that by letting Hemings go. This may well have been at the request or suggestion of James’s mother, Critta, and all his aunts and uncles, who certainly had opinions and preferences about this.

Whatever the genesis of Jefferson’s decision, the way he handled this episode speaks volumes about his view of power, the way to wield it, and his relations with members of the Hemings family. Other slaveholders would surely never have tolerated Hemings’s defiant refusal to return to Monticello unless Jefferson had taken him out of the control of Lilly. He would have been apprehended and brought back to the plantation in chains, if needed. Jefferson clearly had the right under law to do just that, with the authority to apply corporal punishment upon Hemings’s arrival if he desired. This takes us back into a consideration of the gulf between what Jefferson had the power to do and what he was inclined to do, as influenced by his personality and his particular relations with individual enslaved people.

While Jefferson had virtually unlimited power over the Hemingses, he felt personally constrained in the use of that power. He did not for a moment have to listen to Hemings’s preference for a new supervisor and vow not to return to Monticello until his preference was granted. And when James tricked Oldham and disappeared down the river instead of returning to Charlottesville on the stagecoach as Jefferson had directed, Jefferson had the power to be draconian in his response. That he was willing to “forgive the follies of a boy” for running away does not explain why he allowed James Hemings to escalate the gravity of the situation by dictating terms to him and then defying him even after Jefferson had been amenable to those terms.

Though Jefferson never wrote why he did not take a firmer hand with Hemings even after he had defied him, the end result of his actions suggests the answer. His extreme forbearance gave the family who ran his household, including his mistress and his children, and his favored artisans, one more reason to have a sense of gratitude toward him while deepening any affection they may have had for him. He probably congratulated himself for his own sense of fairness on this occasion: he had done a good thing. It is too easy to cast this as simply another example of Jeffersonian manipulation—a calculated stunt designed to impress. As a mere stunt, it was a rather expensive one, for unlike his uncles Martin, Robert, and James, the younger James Hemings did not merely provide creature comforts to Jefferson. He was a healthy working male slave who made a product that brought income to Monticello. It was no small matter to let him go. If it was manipulation, it was the type of manipulation that all human beings engage in as we try to keep order in our existences by pleasing the people closest to us and maintaining our own internal sense of ourselves as just and fair actors.

It may be difficult from our vantage point to believe that Jefferson had an internal sense of justice and fairness, depending as he did on a labor system that was constitutively unjust and unfair. By holding upward of two hundred “souls,” as he called them, in bondage, he worked injustice and unfairness in their lives every single day. James Hemings should never have been in Lilly’s pathway, working in Jefferson’s nail factory against his will, for no pay, subjected to violent coercion to make him work. Lilly had simply gone too far. If he had struck Hemings once or twice, matters would not have gotten to the point that Jefferson allowed Hemings to leave the plantation. But Jefferson did have his own sense of fairness within the confines of his inhumane way of life, and he showed it in the way he resolved the crisis with James Hemings. The proviso to this, however, is that Hemings’s identity created the necessary spark to Jefferson’s impulse for this level of fairness.

Although Hemings never again appeared in the Farm Book’s listing of slaves, this was not the end of his dealings with Monticello. Jefferson’s memorandum book records a payment to “James Hem.” in 1815 for finding the eyepiece of a telescope for him.
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Hemings apparently lived in informal freedom, coming back to see his family on the mountain as he desired and dealing with Jefferson on apparently cordial terms. There is also no hint of any hard feelings between Jefferson and Robert Hemings, who almost certainly played some role in his nephew’s life during the half year he lived in Richmond as an escapee from Monticello.

“The Incomparable Sally”

Jefferson’s enemies, fastening on the public interest in the private lives of leaders, continued to refer to Sally Hemings throughout Jefferson’s presidency. Despite the outraged and moralizing tone of some of the references, it is highly probable that stories about the president and his beautiful young mistress made many men in the country secretly admire more than revile him. “Dusky Sally” and “Black Sal” appeared sporadically in their press. No other enslaved person was so well known, yet truly unknown, to the American populace. There were not only prose newspaper references. For some reason, the story moved many to verse, and it is these offerings that give the true flavor of the psyches of the men—and we can assume they were all men—who composed them. John Quincy Adams, then a senator from Massachusetts and Jefferson’s occasional dinner guest at the President’s House, who presumably should have had other, more constructive things to do, devoted himself with an intensity that was rather unseemly to periodically writing and publishing anonymously satirical poems about the president and his mistress, including “The Discoveries of Captain Lewis,” a “lampoon” of the Lewis and Clark expedition that contained references to “Dusky Sally.” At other times Adams turned classical, composing another long, racially hostile, and dull effort, “Ode to Xanthias Phoceus,” in October 1803 for the
Port-Folio
, a magazine out of Philadelphia. Adams was quite proud of this latter poem, writing to his brother Thomas that the work “produced some sensation in this quarter” and predicting that it would “not pass unobserved in other parts of the union.”
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The Adams family bore a different relationship to the Hemings story than others who were just reading about it in the newspapers. They—at least John and Abigail, for certain—had seen Sally Hemings. She had lived in their London home for several weeks when she was a young girl, and they were in a position to describe her to their son John Quincy. It is often said that John Adams did not believe that Jefferson and Hemings were lovers. But if he did not, he was probably the only member of the family who did not. Abigail certainly believed it. She and Jefferson exchanged a series of letters in 1804 when Adams sent her condolences after learning about the death of Jefferson’s daughter Maria. By this time it had been conclusively proven (through the publication of Jefferson’s own letters after he and his supporters flatly denied that he had supported Callender) that he had been giving Callender money even as the aggressive Scot launched vile personal attacks against Abigail’s husband. Jefferson, ever the optimist and seeker of affection, believed that Abigail had forgiven him, when she was merely expressing her sincere regret at the death of his daughter. The renewed correspondence quickly deteriorated as politics crept into the discussion. At one point Adams expressed her feelings to her estranged friend in blunt terms. She told Jefferson, among other things, that she had always thought he had been a good friend, an “affectionate father,” and a “kind master” until she had read Callender’s writings, but that she could no longer hold those opinions of him.
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Callender had said nothing that touched on Jefferson’s role as a father and slave master other than that he had a long-term relationship with one of his slaves, under the eyes of his daughters Martha and Maria. Adams’s statements about Jefferson as a father and a master could not have been a reference to anything else but the revelations about him and Sally Hemings.