The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (87 page)

The Hemings children did not venture into this future unguided, for Jefferson had a direct hand in shaping their progress through life and the way they viewed themselves. In fact, so many things are known about the Hemings siblings that bear the mark of Jefferson’s actions that Madison Hemings’s picture of his life with his father seems more a description of Jeffersonian ambivalence than of rejection. There is a predictable sameness to their lives that has the unmistakable shadings of a plan, from their names, their hobbies (the violin), and the trade they would be trained to follow.

Other than running errands when they were small, all the Hemings children remained out of the realm of service and never had the occasion to develop an identity as servants. In another time, and in a different household, Harriet Hemings might have been considered a perfect personal maid for one of Jefferson’s numerous granddaughters. Instead, Harriet “learned to spin and weave” in Jefferson’s small textile operation, though his overseer remembered that she never worked very hard.
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Her father gave her something to do that did not automatically signal a subservient status—to him, the outside world, and to her and her siblings. After all, his mother and sisters had been spinners. Susan Kern has pointed out, in writing of the Jefferson females, that they used spinning primarily as a “polite hobby.” Jefferson bought his mother a spinning wheel and sent her wool and cotton for spinning.
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Certainly the republican revolution that brought forth the cult of republican wife and motherhood idealized women who produced homespun, lessening their family’s dependence upon foreign manufactures. Like all daughters, Harriet probably spent a good deal of her time under her mother’s direction learning to sew and to do other domestic tasks. Harriet Hemings was prepared at Monticello to be a successful wife and a mother, which is exactly what she turned out to be.

Jefferson followed a similar, gender-appropriate pattern with his sons. The boys were trained to become the types of workers he admired the most—carpenters and joiners, instead of blacksmiths, gardeners, or hostlers. Jefferson placed all three under the direction of his most trusted artisan, John Hemings, who became a surrogate father to each one. Madison Hemings remembered becoming apprenticed to his uncle at age fourteen, but Jefferson’s records indicate that the Hemings brothers began to assist John Hemings sometime after the age of ten. A Jefferson Farm Book entry in 1810 lists twelve-year-old Beverley as a workman along with his uncle. Six years later, in September of 1816, when Madison was four months shy of his twelfth birthday, Jefferson wrote to his overseer Joel Yancey at Poplar Forest, telling him when he would be arriving at the plantation. “John Hemings & his two aids will set out so as to be at Poplar Forest the evening before us.”
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The “us” included Jefferson and his daughter Martha and his sons’ uncle Burwell Colbert. The “two aids” were the eighteen-year-old Beverley the nearly twelve-year-old Madison. Neither Beverley nor Madison at ages eleven or twelve would have been expected (or allowed) to do dangerous carpentry work, but carrying their uncle’s tools, watching him work, and getting used to the world of carpentry before they actually tried their hand at it made perfect sense. The extremely talented and literate “Johnny” would teach them everything they needed to know.

Still, a Jefferson with working-class sons seems incongruous. Why not train them to be at his level in society? As Rhys Isaac has observed, class, along with race and status, governed the way Jefferson viewed his children.
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He had less to be concerned about with Harriet, who as female was not really his counterpart. Great beauty and a genteel (gentle) manner would be enough for her to attract a decent mate—at almost all levels of society. She could be successful at womanhood with just the rudiments of an education. As for his sons, Jefferson knew they would not grow up to be thought of as gentlemen in the same way that he was thought of as a gentleman. Unlike their grandfather John Wayles, whose whiteness allowed him to escape the lower class, Beverley, Madison, and Eston were of African origin. Had it been widely known that they were his sons, that part of their heritage would have to be known, too. This man, at the very pinnacle of the social pyramid, had children who had been born at the lowest status in society. The basic imperative was not to bind them to himself, or to try to make them junior versions of the public Thomas Jefferson, but to get them out of that status and, one suspects, he hoped, into a different race.

In the letter to Francis Gray in which he explained how much white blood it took to turn a black person white, Jefferson declared that freeing a person who was one-eighth black, like his children, would make that person a free white citizen of the United States.
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There was, of course, no reference to the Hemings children in this letter. It seems highly unlikely, however, that they were far from his mind when he issued the unnecessary (Gray was not interested in questions of U.S. citizenship) and emphatic pronouncement about the effect of emancipation upon people like his offspring.
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He knew that, when they became adults, he was going to make them the best thing he could think of, free white American citizens.

The historian Peter Onuf has noted how much Jefferson’s plan for the emancipation, and then the colonization, of American slaves resembled his situation with his children, in that it required the separation of parent from child. Jefferson acknowledged the difficulty that posed, but suggested that the great prize to be won—freedom for the generations to come—should not be thwarted out of sentimentality about the relationship between one parent and one child.
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This may have been a rationalization on his part, a way to explain why he had children who could never belong to him in the way children were supposed to belong to their parents—and why in the end that was still a good thing. One was to think of what freedom would mean to future generations. As things turned out, Jefferson’s calculations were right; his grandchildren who lived as white people used the privilege of whiteness and prospered greatly. We will never know what, if any, emotional toll this deferral of familial connection took on him, Sally Hemings, and their children. There is no way around the fact that their predicament at Monticello—and there is no better way to characterize the situation with Hemings and Jefferson, their children, and Martha and her children—carried no prospect of a harmonious resolution that could be equally satisfactory to all.

Jefferson did not separate himself from the Hemings children. Choosing to make his sons carpenters and joiners guaranteed that he would at least be able to oversee their work and development. With no other artisan at Monticello did he spend more time than with John Hemings. During the years of Jefferson’s retirement, where John Hemings was, Beverley, Madison, and Eston—when he was old enough—were, too. When Madison Hemings astutely observed that Jefferson had “but little taste for agricultural pursuits” and preferred instead to be among “his mechanics,”
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he was talking, in part, about himself and his brothers.

Although Madison Hemings, an obviously very reserved and private man, gave a rich account of his life at Monticello, we really cannot gauge from his recollections alone what life was like for all of his siblings, especially not Beverley and Harriet. The world of siblings is not static. Each one enters the unit at different stages in the lives of the parents and the life of the family itself. That is even more so when there are large gaps in ages between siblings, years in which the family’s circumstances can change drastically. Beverley Hemings was seven years old when his little brother, Madison, was born. He was a full decade older than Eston. By the time Madison grew old enough to really pay specific attention to how Beverley and Jefferson interacted—say, when he was nine or ten, and that estimate may be generous—Beverley was well into his teens, certainly past the point of playing games on the lawn with anyone. Although Harriet was only four years older than Madison, that was still enough to create a gap in his knowledge about how Jefferson dealt with her when she was small.

Where one ends up in life is very often determined by where one starts, and it is, perhaps, significant that Beverley and Harriet Hemings entered their family and Monticello at a very different time in the life of the family and of the place than their younger brothers. They took paths in life quite different from those of their younger siblings. Both left Monticello to enter the white world immediately, with no apparent consideration of spending any time in the black community. They took white spouses and left blackness completely behind. Although their youngest brother, Eston, eventually followed them into that world, it was only after it became apparent that his children’s lives would be severely circumscribed if they continued to live as people of color.

Beverley Hemings had almost five years at Monticello with Jefferson before Callender exposed his parents’ life together. He was a first son, not the type of person whom a man who knew he would never have white sons could easily or totally have resisted. It would have been one thing for Jefferson to have had a “forbidden” first son living on another of his plantations, quite another to watch this small replica of himself running through the foyer at Monticello. This was the boy who, according to one recollection, would grow up to ascend balloons, one of his father’s great interests from the time he had heard of them until the day he died.
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Beverley bore so many marks of his father that it is not at all likely that Jefferson was ever completely indifferent to him. One of the few specific comments about him hints at an independent streak. In July of 1820 Edmund Bacon wrote a note to Jefferson asking him whether he knew that Beverley had not been coming to the carpenter’s shop for about a week. The now twenty-two-year-old, a year past the time of his promised freedom, apparently decided to take the week off. Jefferson did not respond to his overseer in writing. There is thus no indication whether he knew from John Hemings or Beverley that he had been absent from the shop, or whether he knew anything about it at all.

The person who was most like a full legal white son to Jefferson, of course, was his much adored first grandson and namesake, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. But Jeff Randolph bore neither a physical (other than height), intellectual, nor temperamental resemblance to his grandfather. His somewhat exacting mother worried when he was a boy that he was not very smart. He himself complained that he had been sent to inferior schools in his youth and was never sent to college. Jefferson, who helped direct his education, resigned himself early on to the reality that his grandson was not cut out to be a scholar.
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If Randolph was not an intellectual like his grandfather, he turned out to have been different from Jefferson in another way: he was a sound business manager, who worked tirelessly and successfully to keep his family afloat in the fallout from his grandfather’s disastrous financial affairs.

Jeff also had more of his father’s mercurial and aggressive personality. Although Jefferson preferred incentives to whipping people, he never totally banned whippings on his plantations. He did not, however, administer them himself and spoke ill of overseers because he suspected they actually enjoyed inflicting cruelty. Jeff Randolph, on the other hand, had no compunction about personally wielding the whip. He even whipped an enslaved man in front of his young nephew visiting from Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge. Coolidge recounted the incident in his memoirs and seems to have been horrified by the whole southern way of plantation life. But Jeff Randolph had another trait that must have greatly disappointed his grandfather. According to his sister, Jeff had an “aversion to music,” about which his grandfather was passionate.
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The great irony, or tragedy, is that at least one, if not all, of the Hemings brothers—separated from Jefferson by the gulfs of race, class, and status—may have been more like him substantively than Jeff Randolph was. One wonders whether there was not some attempt to take these boys and turn them into some version of himself. He loved to build. They would build. He loved music and the violin. They would love music and play the violin. As far as the record shows, the youngest, Eston, seemed to have identified with him the most, and with good reason. He was said to be a near copy of Jefferson facially and physically in terms of his height and build. We do not know Beverley’s profession, but music was also the passion of Eston’s soul, so much so that he learned to play the violin and the piano and made his living as a musician. Although he never spoke publicly about Jefferson, he kept alive his connection to him by changing his name from Eston Hemings to E. H. (Eston Hemings) Jefferson when he went into the white world. He also carried a bit of Jefferson with him in his professional life, a private remembrance that had to remain unknown to his audience. Jefferson did not care much for popular music, but there were several songs he liked enough to copy down in his notes, one a tune called “Money Musk.” Decades later, Eston would make “Money Musk” one of his signature tunes as he played at society events throughout southern Ohio.
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Even more important than the fallout from Callender’s exposé was the move of Jefferson’s daughter and grandchildren to the mountain in 1809. Beverley and Harriet Hemings were eleven and eight years old, respectively, when this happened. Unlike Madison and Eston, who were four and a little over one in 1809, they knew a time when the Randolphs were not continuously at Monticello. Martha and her children had always visited during Jefferson’s vacations, but having them move into the household full-time was an important psychological step for all involved. There can be great comfort in knowing that visitors are eventually going to go home. Having the Randolphs as permanent fixtures at Monticello and Martha as the mistress of the plantation necessarily changed the dynamic of life there. Matters were even more delicate because the move was made under unhappy circumstances.