The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (85 page)

Abigail Adams could count. Callender had said in 1802 that Hemings’s first child was about twelve years old, and her time in France had figured in his stories. Anyone familiar with Jefferson’s personal history, as Adams was, knew this indicated that Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings started in Paris. Moreover, Adams even had a tangential connection to it. The girl whom she had encountered as what she took to be a still immature sixteen-year-old, the girl she had thought to send back home, had gone on to Paris and become Jefferson’s mistress. Adams’s letter ended for many years Jefferson’s communication with the woman who had once been his dear friend. She had ventured into territory that no one could touch, much less explore. Writing to Benjamin Rush in 1811, who was in the midst of bringing about the famous postretirement reconciliation of Jefferson and Adams, Jefferson told the doctor how deeply Abigail had hurt him, explaining why it was nearly impossible for him to resume friendly relations with her.
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Neither John Quincy Adams nor his wife, Louisa, much liked Jefferson. Yet they continued to enjoy his hospitality, sitting at the president’s dinner table, very much aware of the missing companion—Hemings—who could not be present. Actually, Louisa, a high-riding snob, went far beyond disliking Jefferson; she despised him, pronouncing him “ungainly, ugly and common” and ridiculing his casual manner and presentation, believing it demeaned the office of the presidency.
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She was particularly upset by one example of Jeffersonian openness. Jefferson was notorious for his ostentatious courtesy to the Native American delegations that visited the President’s House to discuss what they undoubtedly suspected were the terms of various efforts to drive them from their land. On one occasion Jefferson invited the wives of the chiefs, an act that caused great consternation among many who thought it put the Indians on the same social level as whites, and was a particular insult to the white women in attendance. Louisa was acid in her response, linking Jefferson’s respectful and cordial treatment of the Native American women to his relationship to Sally Hemings. “Perhaps this is the first
step
toward the introduction
of the incomparable Sally
” (emphasis in the original).
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Jefferson almost certainly never let on that he was aware of just how much the Adamses disliked him or that he knew that John Quincy was the author of some of the verses that mocked Sally Hemings. At the end of his time in Washington, however, he could not resist using his very dry wit to get in a dig at the younger man. He ran into Adams at the celebration of James Madison’s inauguration in 1809. Adams told his wife that he had seen the now former president, who was in high spirits because he was leaving office, and reported on their quite ironic—intentionally so on Jefferson’s part—conversation. He clearly suspected, or knew, that Adams was behind some of the verses that appeared in the
Port-Folio
, one of the most famous literary magazines of its time, and he wanted Adams to know that he knew. Adams’s report to his wife shows he got the message.

T
RADITIONALLY, THE YEAR
1809 has been seen as the end of one era at Monticello and the beginning of another, signaled by Jefferson’s retirement from public life and return to his beloved mountain home, leaving behind the rough and tumble of politics. But one could also make the case for 1807 as marking the more pivotal end of an important era on the mountain, for that was the year Elizabeth Hemings died. The exact date of the seventy-two-year-old matriarch’s death is unknown, though Lucia Stanton has suggested that it was likely during Jefferson’s summer vacation. Had he been in Washington, some family member would have written to him with the news.

At the time of Hemings’s death, only eight of her known twelve children definitely lived, for Martin Hemings’s whereabouts after 1794 are unknown. She already had over thirty grandchildren and at least four great-grandchildren. That latter number would grow much larger by the end of what would be the family’s final two decades on the mountain. The Jefferson family never wrote substantively of Hemings, and her grandson Madison provided the only memory of his grandmother in her later years, the sole record of any words she spoke. He was about three years old, having been born in January of 1805, and he was in her home as she lay dying. While eating a piece of bread, he offered his grandmother some, and she declined, saying, “Granny don’t want bread any more.” She did not live very long after that.
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This vivid childhood memory, fixed in Hemings’s mind because it was so closely associated with his grandmother’s death, reveals the closeness, or sense of duty, of his family. The little boy was most likely in his grandmother’s cabin because his mother was there, visiting or helping to take care of her mother, who was on her deathbed. We can be certain she would not have been alone in this task, for Elizabeth Hemings had so many daughters and daughters-in-law that there was plenty of help to go around. Although her remaining sons, Robert and Peter, could help in their own ways, caring for the sick and dying was women’s work, as was helping to bring children into the world—tasks that were hardly foreign to Hemings herself. Now the time had come for those whom she had borne and raised to minister to her and bring the cycle of life to a close.

Hemings had lived far beyond the normal life expectancy of her day, and the brief conversation with her small grandson linked those who had experienced the height of the slave trade in Virginia to the generation that would fight the Civil War and destroy the American slave system. Elizabeth’s lost mother represented the direct tie between Africa and Virginia. Madison Hemings’s future sons would grow up to fight for the Union, one said to have perished along with almost thirteen thousand other Union prisoners of war in the infamous Andersonville prison at Fort Sumter, in Georgia.
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Hemings lived to see two of her sons formally emancipated and one daughter, Mary, informally freed living in a house she owned. And she had good reason to be hopeful that her daughter Sally and her children would make it out of slavery, too. Her sons and grandsons were highly skilled workers whose talents provided them some measure of security in a system that was basically insecure—so long as Jefferson remained alive.

It is not known whether Hemings, or her children, besides her son John, were religious. Her grandsons Madison and Eston Hemings, perhaps under the influence of their father, never joined a church when they moved to Ohio in the 1830s—a highly unusual omission, given that they had identified themselves as part of the black community. Church membership in that area was de rigueur among their generation of free blacks, not just for religious purposes, but for the social support that church membership provided.
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One does not have to be religious, however, to embrace the famous words of the apostle Paul as he neared the end of his life, words that have sounded in many African American funeral orations and eulogies over the years: “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.” All that we know of her suggests that Elizabeth Hemings had done the same within the confines of the inhumane system that governed her life from the moment she drew her first breath until the day she drew her last.

E
LIZABETH
H
EMINGS’S DEATH
was actually an emphatic punctuation mark to a series of devastating personal losses for the enslaved community at Monticello and for Jefferson as well. Along with the deaths of Jupiter Evans and the members of the Granger family at the end of 1799 and 1800, Thomas Bell, Mary Hemings’s partner and Jefferson’s longtime friend, died in 1800, leaving his property to Hemings and their children, Robert and Sarah.
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And then there came the terrible tragedy of James Hemings’s death in 1801. There were losses among the Jeffersons, too. Mary Bolling, Jefferson’s older sister, died at the beginning of 1804. But the death that affected him the most deeply—shattered him, actually—was the loss of twenty-five-year-old Maria Jefferson Eppes in that same year.

Like her mother, Maria had always had problems with pregnancy and its aftermath. She gave birth to a daughter during the winter, fell ill, and never recovered. Jefferson, still in Washington awaiting the end of the legislative session, was struck with anxiety when he heard of her difficulties, for it brought back all the memories of the poignant struggles of the mother whom she so closely resembled. Maria had been staying at her sister’s home at Edgehill, just a few miles from Monticello. After her father suggested that she be brought back to the mountain, where she might be more comfortable, slaves made a litter and carried her up to the place of her birth. Jefferson arrived home on April 4, 1804, to find his daughter in a much weakened state, though she rallied a bit, buoyed by his presence. He remained hopeful, but Maria died just thirteen days after he arrived.
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Jefferson was disconsolate, seared by his personal loss and, no doubt, the sense of the unfairness of it all. Her mother had died early, at thirty-four, but even Martha Jefferson had nine more years on earth than her daughter. While their sadness could not have approached that of Maria’s father, husband, sister, and small son, Francis, members of the enslaved community may have felt some sense of loss, too. Maria had not been as much of a presence at Monticello in recent years as her sister, Martha, but many people there had known her from her childhood. Although we do not know how Sally Hemings felt about her niece, theirs had been a long association, and even outright enemies can regret the death of an antagonist. Despite the differences in their statuses, she and Maria had shared a great adventure, two young girls crossing the Atlantic as a pair to live and learn in a new culture and language. Now James was gone, and so was Maria. Of the five Virginians who had known the world of the Hôtel de Langeac, the Champs-Elysées, and the Bois de Boulogne, and were familiar with life in Paris just before and during the fall of the ancien régime, only Sally Hemings, Jefferson, and Martha Randolph remained.

There was death and then there was life. Though it could in no way have lessened Jefferson’s pain at the loss of his daughter, Sally Hemings gave birth to their third child, a second son conceived during the month and a half Jefferson was at Monticello after he came home to attend to his daughter, Maria.
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She was a mother again, this time to a child who would grow up to care for her in her final days and keep her story alive for the generations of their family and for history. This boy was named James Madison Hemings, apparently not at the direction of Jefferson himself, though he could hardly have objected to the name.

According to Madison Hemings, Dolley Madison suggested that he be named after her husband, promising his mother a present if she did. Hemings said this conversation occurred at the time of his birth, but like many people recounting family stories—for example, Martha Randolph’s apparent blending of the layout of the second Monticello with the first when detailing the events surrounding her mother’s death—Hemings collapsed the timing of an encounter his mother had with Dolley Madison. As it turns out, Dolley Madison was not at Monticello on January 19, 1805, the day Madison Hemings was born, but she and her husband were at Monticello during the preceding September when his mother was in her sixth month of pregnancy with him.
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Dolley evidently made the comment—if it’s a boy name him after my husband, and I’ll give you a gift—when Sally Hemings was pregnant, not on the very day she gave birth.

Hemings recounted this event not for any evident pride in the name James Madison but because it was an instance in which his mother was poorly treated—a thing not easily forgotten. Dolley reneged on her promise, even though she knew that Hemings had named her little boy Madison. This is exactly the kind of slight a mother might point out to her children to alert them about the character of an individual with whom they had to come into contact over the years, whether she wanted to or not. Most interesting of all, Hemings linked Dolley’s bad act to the attitude whites had generally exhibited toward blacks up until that moment in history: they had been careless and arrogant people who took liberties with others. They made promises to nonwhites that they thought nothing of breaking. The only white person who appears to have been exempted from that blanket condemnation was his father: Jefferson had kept his promises to Hemings’s mother to give her a good life and free their children.

Neither James nor Dolley Madison was naïve, and James certainly was no more a prude than Jefferson. By 1805 both he and Dolley, who took a keen interest in the private lives of others, surely knew of Jefferson’s enslaved mistress, Sally. There is an indication that Dolley’s suggestion of a name for Hemings’s child may have created some competition within the Jefferson household. Almost a year to the day after James Madison Hemings was born, Martha Randolph, while visiting her father at the President’s House, gave birth on January 17, 1806, to James Madison Randolph.
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In one year’s time, Jefferson had a son and grandson named for his close friend.

The year of Madison Hemings’s birth was a particularly delicate time for Jefferson. Callender had been dead for two years, but New England Federalists continued to use Jefferson’s private life as a form of background music to their relentless critique of his presidency. This, even though his resounding victory in the election of 1804—in the face of Callender’s exposé—clearly showed that the majority of the American electorate apparently did not care about the issue. Voters may have enjoyed reading about it—been titillated by it—but stories about Jefferson’s mistress were irrelevant to the question whether he should be president, especially after the triumph of the Louisiana Purchase had many of them looking west to a new future. The Federalists, of course, would soon have a real issue with which to beat Jefferson about the head and shoulders: the passage of the Embargo Act of 1807, which began his ultimately ill-fated attempt to use economic pressure rather than war to deal with British attacks on American interests on the high seas.

The embargo and its attendant legislation aimed to prevent any shipping from American ports, with the goal of punishing Great Britain and France, each of which in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars was trying to stop the neutral United States from trading with its enemy. The logic was that if the Europeans lost American goods, they would see the advantages of coming to reasonable terms with the new nation. But America paid a tremendous price for this policy. The embargo had a devastating effect upon the American economy.
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In the face of this serious national crisis, and the policy debate about the efficacy of a measure that was bringing financial ruin to many, carping about Jefferson and his slave mistress could only have appeared trifling. But in the interlude after his reelection and before the embargo, attacks on Jefferson for his alleged atheism and his relationship with Sally Hemings were the only weapons at the Federalists’ disposal. As often happens when no life-defining policy matters are at stake in the country, or when the party out of power feels particularly impotent, the political discourse turned to an obsessive investigation of and focus upon the supposed “character” of the chief executive. And because character in the United States is almost always measured by sexual behavior and religious beliefs, Jefferson, who later declared, “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know,”
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when pressed to declare his religious views, and who had a still-growing number of children with Hemings, was a prime target for a character-based assault.

That Jefferson was willing to have another child with Hemings in the midst of this intense public scrutiny is not surprising. He did not change course easily, nor did he abandon people close to him because of the criticism of others. His deep sense of loyalty and, it must be said, his great comfort with himself, and eerily fixed belief in the rightness of his decisions, would not allow others to make him second-guess his dealings with people about whom he had made up his mind. It is quite telling that he turned to Hemings during one of the most heartbreaking periods of his life, when he was a veritable portrait of emotional devastation. Madison Hemings’s conception in the harrowing six weeks Jefferson was at home to attend to his daughter shows that this extremely sensitive man sought the comfort of the familiar with the person who understood better than anyone besides his daughter Martha what Maria had meant to him.

It was a rare moment when the very private Jefferson gave vent to his true emotions in his correspondence, but the tone and content of his letters in the aftermath of Maria’s death show a man bereft. Several months after her death, he wrote to John Page, a dear and longtime friend, that he had lost “the half of all [he] had” and his “evening prospects” now hung “on the slender thread of a single life,” meaning, of course, his daughter Martha.
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At the time Jefferson wrote those words, he had six grandchildren whom he adored and who were far from “nothing” to him. His children with Sally Hemings, two at the time of this letter, could never belong to him as Martha and Maria did, or as his grandchildren did, for that matter. They were being raised to leave him and, perhaps, even their mother if they chose to go into the white world.