The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (91 page)

Ellen could easily have educated one of Colbert’s children without “pitching” a “claim” to the child, as if there were no way for her to conceptualize the Colberts except as possessions. Actually, Jefferson’s grandchildren did teach enslaved people at Monticello to read. In 1816, while on a visit to Poplar Forest, seventeen-year-old Cornelia Randolph asked her mother to send a dictionary that she had intended to give to John Hemings, but had left behind at Monticello. Beverley and Madison Hemings were at Poplar Forest, too, and would have had access to the dictionary as well. Cornelia, however, took an interest in Hemings’s education, but without pitching claims to him in any way.
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Ellen did suggest that she would relinquish her “claim” upon little Martha Colbert if she married and moved away from her family. That would have been some small consolation to Colbert, but he knew that the fulfillment of this promise was entirely up to Ellen. And what of Ellen’s sisters—had they promised to leave Susan and Emily Colbert at Monticello when and if they ever married? No matter how frequently it happened, no matter how endemic it was to a system that treated human beings like property, enslaved people never got used to having their children claimed by others as possessions.

We will never know, because he left no record, what Colbert really thought of the family who viewed his children and the rest of his extended family as items to be parceled out among themselves. As we will see, Jefferson’s will kept him pretty much under the influence of the Randolph family until he died. But because he was so close to Jefferson and, unlike his aunt Sally, an acceptable enslaved person to write about openly, Colbert appears regularly in Randolph family stories and correspondence. He has also appeared in Jefferson scholarship from the earliest days as an exemplar of the kind of slave that southerners found most appealing. He and Sally Hemings were the only enslaved people who were ever said to have lived in the house at Monticello, though it is possible that others, James Hemings, for example, did as well.
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One must be wary of the “faithful darky” stories beloved by so many generations of slavery’s apologists, because they seldom involve a sophisticated consideration of a given enslaved person’s possible motive in playing the role of the “faithful darky.” Colbert was very likely making calculations about how best to proceed, given his circumscribed position. It will be recalled that Jefferson had singled him out for special treatment as early as the 1790s, when Colbert was still in his early teens, most probably in preparation for the role he played in Jefferson’s retirement: his faithful manservant who could be counted on to put his interests first, to keep his secrets, and to appear happy to do both. It would have taken a strong person, indeed, to resist what appears to have been Jefferson’s sustained effort, from Colbert’s early adolescence, to make him think he was special to Jefferson.

Although it seems that Colbert had a genuine fondness for Jefferson and that Jefferson was fond of him, it must be remembered that affection usually carries a complement of self-interest. We often gain from displaying it to another. The most immediate reward is reciprocity. Jefferson gained Colbert’s loyalty and discretion. For his part, Colbert could have affection for Jefferson but never lose sight of the man’s ultimate utility for him. And as long as he responded to Jefferson’s displays in the expected fashion, the Randolphs might continue to “value” the Colbert family enough to keep them as close together as possible. Mutual affection was practical, if not symbiotic, for the two men in their respective circumstances.

We get some sense of the nature of the relationship between Colbert and Jefferson in two separate events where each one thought the other in danger of dying. In July of 1819, just a month before his wife’s death, Colbert, while at Poplar Forest with Jefferson, fell gravely ill with some “obstruction of the bowel” that caused him enormous pain and prevented him from sleeping for two days. The doctor called in to attend to him bled him until he almost passed out. He also prescribed laudanum, which may have exacerbated Colbert’s intestinal problem, but did ease his pain enough to allow him to sleep.
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Ellen Randolph’s letter describing Colbert’s illness and the toll it took on him and on her grandfather is deeply revealing. Jefferson was beside himself with worry throughout this entire episode. “I never saw any body more uneasy than Grandpapa, and his constant anxiety by convincing me still more of his extraordinary value for Burwell, increased my own fears and feelings to a degree that surprised even me.”
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Ellen creates a vivid picture of a distraught Jefferson, who on other occasions reviled doctors, now waiting anxiously for the local physician to arrive and help Colbert. While she was concerned about her grandfather’s manservant, she was still more concerned about the effect Colbert’s illness was having on her grandfather, fearing what would happen if he woke up one morning and found Colbert dead. And then Ellen witnessed something else that seemed to startle her but that is wholly unsurprising, given the relationship between the two men.

Hemings’s attentiveness to and concern for his sister’s child would be considered completely normal in a culture that placed a high value on extended kinship networks. This lesson in family feeling and responsibility set an example for Beverley and Madison Hemings, who would have witnessed the same display as Ellen. In fact, it is probable that they, too, were involved at least in some way in their uncle’s care, and also saw their father’s response to their cousin’s suffering. Helping a severely weakened grown man, who was just a shade under six feet tall, into a warm bath may have required more than just two hands.
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Nineteen-year-old Israel Gillette, of Monticello, who would later give his recollections of life on the mountain, took over for Colbert during his illness. He did so well, and pleased Jefferson so much, that Ellen said that she had to “abuse” him “every day to prevent him from thinking hereafter, that the complaints I have no doubt we
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have cause to make, are without foundation—is not this being very prudent and shewing great judgement and forethought.”
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This may have been a joke—or perhaps not. She may have actually thought that toying in this manner with a person over whom she had nearly plenary power made good sense.

Jefferson’s report of Colbert’s illness shows the folly of thinking that his letters express the sum total of his emotions about a given subject. Much more was always going on under the surface in the mind and life of this very complicated man, much more than he was willing to share openly. He did sometimes give vent to his deep feelings about matters and people, but he may have thought it unseemly to put down for posterity the degree of his emotional vulnerability to an enslaved person. Instead, his letter describing this episode speaks in a matter-of-fact fashion, “we have been near losing Burwell…but he has got about again and is now only very weak.” As the historian Jefferson Looney has noted, it is only through his granddaughter’s description of his frantic concern that we learned how deeply the possible death of Colbert affected Jefferson.
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Colbert had equal cause to be anxious about Jefferson six years later. John H. I. Browere, described as an “itinerant sculptor” by Dumas Malone and a “vile plaisterer” by Jefferson’s granddaughter Virginia, appeared at Monticello in the fall of 1825. Browere, a New Yorker, asked the elderly and now frail Jefferson to allow him to take a life mask. Against his better judgment and that of his family, Jefferson decided to go along with the procedure. The “artist” positioned Jefferson on his back on a sofa. Perhaps to steady himself while doing this and to help him rise when he wanted to sit up, Jefferson rested one hand on a nearby chair. Members of his family at one point stepped out of the room, leaving Colbert with Jefferson and Browere. Browere, who was apparently not very skillful, covered Jefferson’s face and neck with plaster that hardened too quickly. The mask began to impair Jefferson’s breathing and prevented him from speaking. Already in a weakened state when Browere arrived, and now furthered enfeebled by the loss of oxygen under the plaster, he could not stand up. Finally, he remembered the chair, lifted it up and banged it on the floor, alerting Burwell and Browere to his distress. Panic ensued. Colbert was at complete attention, though really unable to do anything. Browere immediately attempted to remove the mask, but because he had not put sufficient oil on Jefferson’s face, the plaster stuck to his skin. Jefferson groaned and even sobbed as sections of the cast were pulled off his face.
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Jefferson described the ordeal to Madison with a wry undertone that disguised the fact that the “life mask” had almost become a death mask.

In Jefferson’s description “the family” was alarmed; he, merely exhausted and resigned. Actually the family members—including, in Jefferson’s patriarchal sense, Colbert—were more than alarmed. They were furious. According to Jefferson family accounts, after the cast was removed, Colbert hurried to help Jefferson up. He was holding the weakened man in his arms and glowering ominously over Jefferson’s shoulder at the hapless Browere when other members of the household rushed into the room upon realizing there was a problem.

Amazingly, instead of gathering up his materials and leaving forthwith, Browere stayed long enough to dine at Monticello. Jefferson rallied and appeared at the table that evening, but he was described as “tormented by the chattering of the magpie [Browere,]” who was so boorish and insensitive that he actually joked about having almost killed the former president of the United States. Even more astonishingly, when word of the fiasco became generally known, and Browere feared his reputation might suffer, he asked Jefferson to write a testimonial for him, which for some inexplicable reason he agreed to do.
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While professional negligence was at the heart of Jefferson’s near-death experience, the episode was a stark reminder to all those enslaved at Monticello that their continued settlement at this place now depended upon the life of one who was slowly fading away. The Hemingses, to be sure, were not the only long-term residents on the mountain who were about to have their lives transformed when the inevitable arrived. But no family had longer, closer, more complicated—and more compromising—connections to the man whose existence was the only thing that stood between the vast majority of them and the auction block. What would become of their family and the enslaved community at Monticello when he was gone?

T
HE SEEDS OF
disaster had been planted early, though just how early is hard to say. If we think in terms of distinct financial events as paving the way for the Hemings family’s tragic endings at Monticello, we might start with the time the family arrived on the mountain in the 1770s. Before they came to Jefferson as part of the assets of John Wayles’s legacy, Jefferson had no extensive experience with all that could go wrong with the liabilities side of a ledger. His father had been able to provide a comfortable, even sophisticated, style of living for his family while leaving his heirs assets that exceeded the value of his liabilities. His mother’s debts were relatively small, and easy to settle, although he took a long time to do that.

Jefferson’s engagement with the Wayles debt really began his lifelong and frustrating struggle with creditors. The legacy itself worked almost as a Faustian bargain for him, not because of its inherent nature but because of his. For Jefferson the glass was always half full; his basic optimism tended to make him accentuate the positive, while eliminating the negative. So when he received Wayles’s thousands of acres and 135 slaves and added them to his own, not insignificant holdings, it solidified his inner view of himself as an extremely wealthy man. And he had good reason to think that way if one considered only the totality of his assets—the half full glass. The Wayles inheritance did, in fact, make him one of the largest property owners—in both land and enslaved people—in Virginia. That never meant, however, that he was free from danger. Judicious planning, frugality, and considered attention to detail were required to manage both the benefits and the burdens that came with what Wayles had left to his daughter and, by extension, to him.

It is not that Jefferson failed to recognize the perils of debt. But other than make him worry at times, and voice exasperation at the way his creditors harassed him, his knowledge did not typically order his daily behavior. He did periodically take steps to try to alleviate his financial problems, initiating schedules to repay creditors after selling land and enslaved people. And in what must have been one of the most bittersweet moments of his life, he sold in 1815 his personal library, consisting of 6,847 books, to the Library of Congress to replace its collection, just 3,000 books, lost when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812.
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In most respects, Jefferson was not so different from other Virginians of his class for whom indebtedness was a way of life. But he had more expensive tastes and an obsession with building that strained his finances in ways far beyond the ordinary. He also had a penchant for plans that would supposedly generate enough income to bring him into solvency. Though he realized he had to cut expenses, he clearly placed greater emphasis on getting more money as a way of escaping debt than effectively managing his spending. This strategy has trapped many a debtor into a lifetime cycle of often unnecessary financial instability—waiting to win the lottery or for “the ship to come in” before taking effective control of their economic lives. His nail operation had been profitable until a flood of cheaper British nails destroyed his market. Then he also sank thousands of dollars into a flour mill that turned into “a disaster of mammoth proportions.”
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It is easy to understand his preferences along these lines. A nail factory required a building and turned out a product he could physically count. It had mechanical implements that made an item needed for other building. The flour mill had to be designed and built—another mechanical operation. Both can be seen as large-scale versions of the gadgets Jefferson so adored. Why not play with them? Cutting back on expenses was never so alluring; that would just mean doing without something he wanted. And since he was, in his own mind, basically wealthy, why should that really be necessary? Had Jefferson been less of an optimist—some might say more of a realist—he might never have taken his persona as a wealthy man so much to heart, treating his outstanding debts and obligations as external to his world, instead of as integral parts of his overall financial state.

Though he famously told James Madison that the debts of one generation should not be transferred to succeeding ones—because “the earth belongs…to the living”—there is no evidence that Jefferson ever seriously doubted that the wealth of one generation should go to its progeny. His odd decoupling of the concept of assets from liabilities, benefits from burdens, may explain something almost unfathomable: though he kept meticulous records of his daily expenses—how much he spent, usually for what purpose, and where he was when he spent it—he never totaled up his expenses and compared them to his income. Double-entry bookkeeping was not for him, and, as a result, he never really grasped his extremely perilous financial condition.
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He seemed to live totally in the moment, keeping all hints of a day of reckoning off the page—and thus invisible. Indeed, at several key moments in his life, Jefferson was brought up short, shocked to find that he owed thousands of dollars that he had no idea he owed. One suspects this was a case of not wanting to know. Had he ever really acknowledged how deeply in debt he was at a given time, he would have incurred the responsibility of doing something about it. Instead, he walked through life assuming that all would work out in the end; and since he thought of himself as a good and well-intentioned person, who was often generous to a fault with others, that would surely count for something in the overall scheme of things.

The historian Herbert Sloan, in his detailed exploration of Jefferson’s handling of his finances, raised the deep tragedy at the heart of this story with characteristic insight and understatement. “Jefferson’s attitude toward his debts, his belief that in time things would right themselves, his certainty that, if allowed to do things his way, everything would turn out for the best, had significant consequences for others.”
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The “others,” as Sloan explained, who would suffer the most grievously when Jefferson’s time and luck ran out, were the enslaved on his farms, including the Hemingses, whose lives were inexorably linked to his fortunes. Under the rules of his society, which supposedly justified the plantation way of life, the patriarch who governed had a corresponding duty to protect those who lived under his dominion. The price of failure was the humiliation of the patriarch and his legal family, but it also involved the actual decimation of the families of the enslaved—husbands, wives, children, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers—scattered to the four winds.

Jefferson’s salary as president should have been enough to help put him on the road to financial security. Despite this, he retired to Monticello in even more dire financial straits than when he had taken office, stunned by the new debts accrued in eight years. The way he conducted the business of the presidency was the heart of the problem. He spent lavishly, out of his own pocket, on the much storied dinner parties—or “campaigns,” as he called them—that he hosted for members of Congress and other government officials. This was not frivolity. These affairs had a serious public purpose for Jefferson and were critical to the way he governed. There he presided over a roundtable, eschewing waiters, serving the food to his guests himself, “being mother,” as it was called.
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The exquisite wine and choice French fare and his casual manner displayed in this intimate setting were central to his plan to build the Republican Party as a bulwark against Federalism that would outlast his tenure in office. The development of the United States along the lines he thought preferable was Jefferson’s true obsession. It operated to the detriment of any real consideration of ending slavery in the country or at Monticello. It even operated to the detriment of his legal white family. Much as he spoke of his family as the center of his universe, he, like many public men before and after him, arranged his life so that he spent large amounts of time away from his family doing what he thought was the real business of his life. Not only did his family lose time with him; his only surviving legal daughter, Martha, still with school-age children, would end up without her own home—the object of pity and charity.

How much the enslaved people closest to Jefferson, like Sally Hemings and Burwell Colbert, who were with him when no one else was around, knew of his financial circumstances upon his return to the mountain and in the years that followed will remain unknown. Though he may never have confided in either, a worried look or furrowed brow can communicate volumes. Even the free whites and unfree blacks who were not intimately involved with him could sense the precarious state of his finances, without knowing the full extent. Conversations overheard, strained silence at the mention of certain topics, bills delivered from persistent and familiar commercial outfits, can send messages almost as explicit as those directly conveyed.

The enslaved at Monticello, portrayed in early Jefferson scholarship as childlike and simpleminded, were anything but that. One has only to read the memoirs of men like Isaac Jefferson and Israel Gillette, with their dead-on observations about the financial states, family relationships, and histories of the whites in their world, to know that they were not. They could never have afforded to ignore any visible signs of turmoil. Knowing white slave owners was their business, for their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, were in the hands of these fallible people, who could be expected to put the interests of the enslaved last when and if things began to fall apart.

The sale of Jefferson’s personal library was a major indication that all was not right in the Monticello household. While it was, without question, a great thing for the country, the seed of the magnificent institution that we know today, anyone at all familiar with Jefferson knew how deeply he loved his books, collected over the four decades after the fire at Shadwell destroyed his first library. Isaac Jefferson saw Jefferson’s library as central to his persona. One of his most vividly expressed memories of Jefferson was as the man whose “mighty head” was full of information gleaned from the books strewn about his room, eager to consult them when asked a question he did not know the answer to. Seeing Jefferson’s books, the source of his strength, packed away in crates and loaded onto wagons moving down Monticello’s roundabouts was like seeing Samson’s shorn locks upon the floor. That effect did not last, however, for, as he famously proclaimed, Jefferson could “not live without books.” Not long after he said goodbye to one library, he began to build another.
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There were indeed other mixed signals at Monticello as Jefferson continued to live outwardly as if he had no serious money problems. The economic fallout from the War of 1812 and poor harvests plagued him during the first ten years of his retirement. The horde of visitors, who it can truly be said helped eat him out of house and home, made matters worse. Sometimes as many as a dozen uninvited guests would show up to dine and stay with him. Jefferson might have been able to avert final ruin had he sold his slaves and a good portion of his land and retreated to his home at Poplar Forest to adopt a much less lavish lifestyle. Monticello was not a prosperous farm. Many of the enslaved people there worked on his building projects instead of in the fields. The large numbers of household servants—all Hemingses—were not making products that could be sold. In fact, as things careered out of control, members of his white family floated to him the idea of a move to Poplar Forest. It was far too late for that. In 1819 land prices collapsed, and the sale of his property, real and human, would not have saved him. Virginia’s economy did not begin to rebound until the 1830s, years after his death.
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Jefferson would never even have considered so drastic a course between 1809 and the 1820s, because he would have seen no need for it. Along with his preference for discovering income-producing activities over drastically cutting expenses, he also embarked upon another surefire losing financial strategy during his retirement: borrowing money to pay off other loans. Any modern-day observer doing the same with multiple credit cards will immediately recognize the morass Jefferson had entered. This was not only a bad practice on its face. It obligated Jefferson to the man who helped him get the bulk of the loans, Wilson Cary Nicholas. This unfortunate relationship really sealed Jefferson’s fate, and the fates of nearly 150 people—Hemingses among them—whose lives would be thrown into utter turmoil and despair because of what happened between Jefferson and Nicholas.

Nicholas, a governor of Virginia between 1814 and 1816, was the president of the Richmond branch of the Bank of the United States. His brother was the president of the Farmer’s Bank. They were the sons of Robert Carter Nicholas, who had been an associate of John Wayles and whom Jefferson had known for many years. With Wilson Nicholas’s help, Jefferson secured hefty loans during the first decade of his retirement from both Nicholas brothers’ banks. Wilson Nicholas was also “family,” the father-in-law of Jefferson’s grandson Jeff Randolph. There is no question that Nicholas helped Jefferson secure the loans on easy terms because of their family connection. But in 1818 it was Jefferson’s turn. Nicholas asked him to cosign two $10,000 notes from the Bank of the United States. From today’s perspective it appears absurd for Nicholas to have sought the endorsement of a man he knew from personal experience had no money and was living life on credit. It was, of course, Nicholas’s knowledge that the Jefferson name carried weight that made him ask for this favor.
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Although Jefferson hesitated over Nicholas’s request—he really did not want to sign the notes—he felt he could not refuse his friend and his grandson’s father-in-law, especially since Nicholas had been solicitous toward him. It turned out to have been one of the single worst mistakes of Jefferson’s life, for him and for those enslaved on his plantations. While on a visit to Poplar Forest, he heard the baleful news. Nicholas was in default. He assured Jefferson that he would be protected, saying that he would never forgive himself if his friend suffered because of his failure. Nicholas’s promise to feel bad if Jefferson was hurt because of him surely provided small consolation, given that if he was wrong about his ability to protect Jefferson, the already financially imperiled former president would have $20,000 plus interest added to his indebtedness. As it happened, Nicholas could not protect Jefferson: he lost everything in the Panic of 1819 and died while visiting his daughter and son-in-law at Tufton, one of Jefferson’s quarter farms. Jefferson thus became liable for the $20,000.
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