The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (90 page)

It is common to think of Jefferson’s trips to Poplar Forest as involving merely his granddaughters. The Randolph family letters set the domestic scene, telling of the tedium of the journey—sometimes broken by picnics along the roadside with Jefferson carving the meat and dishing out the food—and stays in inns along the way. Then there was the scene at the house, with the girls studying Latin and conversing with their grandfather when he was not working and they were not receiving visitors occasionally and going to the homes of others. Naturally, in their own minds, they were the centerpiece of this tableau. The young women did, however, often write of Burwell Colbert, who invariably traveled with Jefferson, and of John Hemings, whom they liked very much, passing along these men’s regards to wives and family left behind. Their correspondents at Monticello followed the same course, sending messages and greetings from family members to these men.
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Jefferson’s granddaughters apparently never mentioned, in any correspondence available to date, the other people from Monticello who were also present at Poplar Forest when they made their visits: Beverley, Madison, and, in later years, Eston Hemings. The scene brought together four Hemings males of different generations who likely got to know one another better than they would have had they been together only at Monticello with more levels of people between them. Colbert’s job was to help Jefferson as needed and keep the house clean. John Hemings was there to work, along with his nephews, on the house itself, the interior and outside. In the isolation of Poplar Forest, their nephews had the same level of contact with the Jefferson granddaughters as they did. It is simply not possible that the Randolph girls did not encounter their grandfather’s sons on a daily basis, or that Jefferson did not have lots of contact with them as he supervised and commented on their work, proceeding right before his eyes.

The Randolphs’ practice of keeping the Colbert and the John Hemings families apprised of one another’s well-being did not extend to conveying messages from Sally Hemings to her still young sons or from her sons to her. The Hemingses may have communicated on their own, or Jefferson could have written letters, kept no copy of them, and sent them by the enslaved people who went back and forth between the two plantations. But the absence of any references to the well-being or activities of Beverley, Madison, and Eston Hemings when they were at Poplar Forest is telling. It fits perfectly with the apparent Jefferson-Randolph family convention that Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings were to exist, as much as possible, in modern parlance, off the radar screen.

The pattern of life that ensued at Poplar Forest perhaps helps put into context Madison Hemings’s decision to name one of his children “Ellen Wayles.”
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This was no random act—the Hemingses were very serious and deliberate in the naming of their offspring. Although Hemings could well have been reaching back to honor his grandfather John Wayles’s mother, Ellen Wayles, it seems more likely that naming his daughter grew out of the nature of his dealings with and view of Ellen Wayles Randolph. At the same time, it is not at all surprising that there would be an asymmetry in how these two people presented their connections to the outside world. Given the way race has been lived in the United States, and given what Ellen thought was at stake for her white family, even if she and Madison Hemings had cordial relations in private, she would feel compelled to deny her true connection to him—indeed to write of him and his siblings as if they were almost strangers to her.

In her letter claiming that her uncle Samuel Carr, not her grandfather, was the father of Madison Hemings and his siblings, Ellen writes with all the authority and sangfroid of one used to having her word treated as the final say on matters. It is, at the same time, a rather poignant document, considering what we know of how Hemings apparently viewed her. The letter, ostensibly just to her husband, Joseph Coolidge, was clearly meant to be shown to others. The strategic passing around of letters was considered a genteel way among upper-class families to convey important information to members of their class without going into the newspapers. In the letter, written in 1858, Sally Hemings was not a woman Ellen knew growing up. She did not have a specific role and function in the Monticello they both shared over the years. She was a woman Ellen barely knew anything about except that she had served as her mother’s lady’s maid in France almost a decade before Ellen was born. Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston were Hemings’s nameless “children,” rather than people Ellen knew well from both Monticello and, in case of the sons, Poplar Forest. Beverley Hemings used to play the violin at the dances the Jefferson granddaughters hosted as young women at Monticello. Yet, by 1858, Sally Hemings and her children might as well have been enslaved people living on another plantation whom Ellen saw on intermittent visits.
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A number of Jefferson’s letters to his overseer at Poplar Forest, Joel Yancey, and our knowledge of John Hemings’s whereabouts make plain that these young men spent at least as much total time at Poplar Forest as Jefferson’s granddaughters. Sometimes they came with Jefferson, at other times they left a few days ahead of time to be there when he arrived, and at still other points they were already in residence when the party from Monticello descended. Jefferson’s letters to Yancy and the letters of his granddaughters show that the Hemings brothers and the granddaughters were there at the same time. For example, in September of 1816, when Beverley was eighteen and Madison was four months shy of his twelfth birthday, Jefferson wrote to Yancy, “John Hemings & his two aids will set out so as to be at Poplar Forest the evening before us.” In November of 1818 he noted, “I shall carry up Johnny Hemings & his 2. assistants early in the year and they will work there till the fall.” The following June he wrote, “I shall be able to leave this for Poplar Forest about the 7th of July, and shall bring with me one glass of one kind to repair damages to the house, while two boxes of another kind will go up from Richmond by the first boat from Lynchburg. Johnny Hemings and his assistants will go when I do; the other carpenters something later.”
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For each of these and other letters making reference to Hemings and his helpers, there are letters from one or more of Jefferson’s grandchildren indicating that they or their mother were at Poplar Forest at the same time as these men. For example, Ellen Coolidge’s letter to her mother of July 18 explains Jefferson’s reference to repairing the “damages to the house.” He had been told that a hail storm had come through Bedford and that, in Ellen’s words, “all the glass on the north side of the house” had been “demolished.” Her postscript confirms Jefferson’s plan of July 7 to have the rest of the Monticello carpenters join John Hemings and his nephews later.
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If his granddaughters’ letters totally “disappear” Beverley, Madison, and Eston Hemings, Jefferson’s letters to his overseer are only marginally more open, following the practice of keeping these young men as anonymous as possible. The problem for him, and his grandchildren, was that the Hemings children had names that were virtually indistinguishable from the rest of their family. William Beverley, George Wythe, Harriet, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Eston—all of these names were connected to Jefferson, either through blood or because of his association with and affection for those individuals. Each name was appropriate for his children or grandchildren, and James Madison was indeed the name of a son and grandson.

Names signify identity. Jefferson did not mind that the Hemings children bore names that signaled their identity to anyone knowledgeable about his family and associations. He evidently wanted that. Neither he nor his family, however, wanted to carry that signal of identity into posterity by indiscriminately putting the Hemings children’s names into their letters. Beverley, Madison, and Eston are, depending upon the year, John Hemings’s “two assistants” or “two aids” or “two apprentices.” In 1825, when writing to his grandson Francis Eppes, who was living at Poplar Forest when a fire damaged the roof, Jefferson reported that he would send Hemings and his “two aids” to help repair it. By that time Beverley was gone, and thirteen-year-old Eston had taken his place. Had it not been for Jefferson’s will, and the serendipity of Madison Hemings’s recollections, we would never have known who the two nameless “aids” and “assistants” at Poplar Forest were. The law absolutely mandated that Jefferson give the names of the people he was granting freedom, so he could not be evasive in that document.
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B
URWELL
C
OLBERT’S CLOSENESS
to Jefferson in his retirement brought advantages, along with acute hazards. Because Jefferson decided to have two homes, Colbert was required to have two homes as well. Of the two men, only Jefferson really needed to escape Monticello and free himself from importuning guests. That was Jefferson’s problem, not Colbert’s, and the younger man had to endure long and frequent separations from his wife, Critta, and their children.

Burwell and Critta Colbert had done something that was highly unusual among Africans Americans, whether enslaved or free. They married one another despite being half first cousins. Burwell was the son of Betty Brown, and Critta was the daughter of Betty’s half sister Nancy Hemings. Whether the taboo against marrying cousins was a holdover from some of the West African cultures from which most enslaved people in the United States hailed, or whether it was something that developed in America, is unknown. But this type of incest was one cultural affect that blacks determinedly resisted picking up from whites, who saw no problem marrying their first cousins, let alone second or third ones.
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We cannot, of course, recover the details of the Colberts’ courtship, and the two young people could easily have had other reasons for falling in love, but one wonders whether the impetus to break this very strong taboo was the lack of suitable partners. The Hemingses tended to pair with other mixed-race people, and there may not have been enough of them who were both unrelated and attractive to them in their immediate environment. As we noted earlier, Colbert apparently did not travel as freely as his uncles Martin, Robert, and James Hemings. There is no record of his having a separate life in Richmond or Fredericksburg, from which he could have drawn a partner. Because of gender conventions, Critta Hemings, a woman enslaved on the nearby Randolph plantation from the time her mother returned to Monticello in the 1790s, also had fewer chances to go very far searching for a husband.

Whatever the basis of their attraction, the evidence indicates that the Colberts were deeply devoted to one another, and both suffered during the enforced separations when Colbert attended Jefferson and his granddaughters at Poplar Forest. Colbert had to receive secondhand reports of the well-being of his family through messages sent in Jefferson’s granddaughters’ letters. In 1816 Betty Brown sent word to her son that his daughter, for whom she was caring, was still as ill as she had been when he left. One can only imagine that the father would rather have been with his wife and daughter comforting them both than keeping house for Jefferson and his granddaughters.
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In 1819 Colbert was at Poplar Forest when he learned that his wife had died, an event that devastated him. He was, Ellen Coolidge wrote, “overwhelmed with grief” at the news. Her words on this subject, however, show with great clarity the vast gulf she placed between herself and the newly widowed and grieving man, for whom she claimed to have had sympathy. It is difficult to imagine that one could find a better window into the mind-set of the soi-disant “good white slave owner.” Ellen’s reaction to the death of Critta Colbert, who had been her nurse for a time, is worth quoting in some detail. Her letter reveals her and her sisters’ attitudes toward the Colbert daughters, Susan, Emily, Martha, and Thenia.

When speaking of Burwell, she added,

One thinks immediately of the thirty-six-year-old man, alone in his room, or being comforted by his uncle John and his first cousins Beverley and Madison Hemings. He is riven with pain at the loss of his wife, the mother of his children, who were being talked about as if they were puppies being picked from a litter by Ellen and her sisters. To be sure, Ellen speaks of wanting to educate “one” of Colbert’s children, and that good intention alone no doubt allowed her to think of herself as a humane person even as she casually detailed the parceling out of another couple’s children in a manner that would have broken her own parents’ hearts had she and her siblings been treated similarly.