The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (92 page)

As Herbert Sloan has pointed out, it was not just the $20,000 that was the “coup de grace,” as Jefferson put it, but the interest on the debt, some $1,200 a year that Jefferson had to pay the Bank of the United States, money that he simply did not have. This fiasco could not have remained hidden from those enslaved at Monticello, for it was the kind of thing people gossiped about. What could cause more talk than the spectacle of a former governor of Virginia, the president of a bank, losing everything in a financial tidal wave along with other, ordinary people? If there was ever any notion that Jefferson might free his slaves, that chance was more than lost after this debacle.

The fact is there really is no reason to suppose that Jefferson would have freed his slaves even if he could have. In the first place, doing so would have deprived his daughter and grandchildren of property, something he would never do, particularly since his son-in-law was in even more desperate straits than he. He had been taking care of Martha Randolph and her family for most of her married life. Jefferson always suffers in comparison with Washington on the question of emancipating slaves, but the differences between the two men’s situations are obvious and stark. Washington had no legal biological white children, and his stepchildren were part of a family that was extremely wealthy in its own right. Inheritance is a central component of private property regimes, and for many people the right to leave property to one’s offspring is the whole point of having property. The right to inherit creates expectations of its own, and George Washington would have had to be willing to disappoint the expectations of a George Washington Jr. and a set of siblings—not to mention their mother—if such offspring had existed. Recall the young Martha Randolph’s great frustration with her father-in-law’s decision to remarry and start a new family. That marriage took property away from her husband and, by extension, from her own children.

The first president, who actually dithered about emancipating his slaves up until the last moment, died in 1799, when Virginia’s economic climate was far better than it was in the 1820s, when Jefferson died.
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Moreover, traces of the fallout from the American Revolution were still influencing attitudes about emancipation. The combination of the revolt on Saint Domingue, which happened before Washington’s death, and Gabriel’s rebellion, which occurred after it, changed the atmosphere in Virginia significantly. The post-Revolutionary enthusiasm for the rights of man that had created a critique of slavery had long faded by the 1820s, and Jefferson’s Virginia was already well on its way toward a full embrace of proslavery ideology. Jefferson discerned early on in his career that, no matter what some members of his society said about the evils of slavery, a legislative abolition of the institution in Virginia, and in the South as a whole, was as close to a political impossibility as anything could be. Accepting that reality, he set his sights on things that he could actually accomplish.

Most important of all, however, is that Jefferson really had made his personal peace with slavery by the time of his retirement, and much of what he experienced in the final phase of his life only reinforced his sense of complacency. Even as the extension of easy credit from the Richmond and Washington banks allowed him to maintain his lifestyle with no serious thought of making drastic changes, his closest relationships with enslaved people on the mountain worked to similar effect. The Hemingses, of course, cannot be considered, in modern parlance, “enablers,” in the manner of the banks, for Jefferson controlled their lives. Still, the way he constructed his life with them did allow him to avoid facing the basic realities of slavery.

It is more common to think about Jefferson and slavery in intellectual terms, what he tried to do about it as a young man in the House of Burgesses and what he said about it in the excised portions of the Declaration of Independence, in the
Notes on the State of Virginia
, and in his various letters over the years. Slavery, however, had an emotional salience in Jefferson’s life that far outstripped its meaning as an intellectual topic for discussion, or even as a political issue. When that is understood, much that seems perplexing and exasperating about him—that he said one thing on the subject but did something else—becomes totally comprehensible, if no less exasperating.

We can discover slavery’s ultimate meaning for Jefferson only by examining intensely the nature of his relations with the people whom he enslaved and by considering what those relationships meant in his day-to-day life. Rather than being a necessary evil or a problem to be solved, a thing to feel tortured about, slavery—as Jefferson lived it with the Hemingses, in particular—provided him with constant reinforcing positive benefits. We see this most clearly in his retirement, the longest period of his continuous residence at Monticello and, not coincidentally, the very period that many consider to mark the nadir of his expressed attitudes about slavery.

Jefferson had returned to Monticello at the age of sixty-six, not an age associated with making dramatic changes in one’s personal life. His longing for home had been a longing for stability, familiarity, and peace. There was surely a sense of vulnerability and a need to be cared for as he approached his declining years. He characteristically was able to escape thoughts of his financial worries by burying himself in a positive project: building the University of Virginia, an idée fixe that sustained him through his most despairing moments. He was happy when his grandson Jeff became more involved in helping him manage his farms, and greatly relieved when he was able to turn the whole business over to the younger man. What was left, and what he helped to perpetuate at Monticello during the final seventeen years of his life, were circumstances perfectly suited to his personality and most deeply felt needs.

There was his white family, Tom Randolph’s failure having brought his daughter Martha and her children back into his domestic fold. But slavery provided him with other things that were great comforts. It gave him a beautiful younger mistress and children, who could be shaped into some version of his private self—woodworker, musician, and sometime gardener. It provided him with a steady companion in Burwell Colbert, whom he styled as a “friend,” who acted as if he genuinely cared for Jefferson and whom Jefferson cared for in return. It gave him artisans whom he could be among and whose work he admired. Jefferson could monopolize all these people’s time, talents, and attention to his heart’s content, which he could not do with the whites in his life.

Consider first his artisans and the workers with whom he was in close contact. Joseph Fossett and John Hemings, in particular, headed the shops that were doing the kind of work that most interested Jefferson. Wormley Hughes was in charge of Jefferson’s gardens. What Susan Stein has called “the collaboration” between Hemings and Jefferson intensified between 1809 and 1826, as Hemings worked both at Monticello and at Poplar Forest.
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Jefferson was not a passive bystander, an owner/employer who issued orders and then stood back. He involved himself in Hemings’s work because he cared about the outcome and, as a woodworker himself, was deeply interested in the process. That Hemings had charge of Jefferson’s three sons also made their relationship deeper and more complex. There is no reason to doubt that part of John Hemings’s apparently intense loyalty to Jefferson stemmed from the fact that Jefferson had entrusted to him his sons, who were also Hemings’s nephews. This intersection of bloodlines and slavery, and the way Jefferson chose to handle the intersection, was just one more way that slavery distorted human relations.

Jefferson’s engagement with Joseph Fossett during his retirement was not as personally intense as his engagement with Hemings. He did make keys and locks, a simpler version of the metalworking that Fossett did in his blacksmith shop, but building things was by far Jefferson’s favored activity. The evidence regarding Fossett’s feelings about Jefferson is more ambiguous. He did, after all, run away during Jefferson’s presidency, and we cannot know certainly that he intended only to go to Washington to see his wife and then return to Monticello. At that point Jefferson clearly did not have the confidence that Fossett would return. That is why he took immediate steps to have him apprehended and brought home. Making Fossett the head of the blacksmith shop a year later, giving him a percentage of the profits earned there, and allowing him to work on his own time and keep the money he earned were Jefferson’s ways of making Fossett more “comfortable” in his enslavement and Jefferson more “comfortable” owning him.

Wormley Hughes was twenty-eight years old when Jefferson retired. He had served many roles at Monticello, including working in the nailery and on several of Jefferson’s building projects. After Jupiter Evans’s death, he took charge of Jefferson’s stables, a task that he enjoyed because he loved horses. By the time of Jefferson’s retirement, he was the head gardener at Monticello, apparently having learned his craft from Robert Bailey, the man who had lived next door to his grandmother for a time. Hughes thus had charge over two things Jefferson loved: horses and his gardens. Jefferson kept a Garden Book from 1766 until 1824, when his health began to fail drastically. The bulk of the entries note the day various plants bloomed, when various fruits and vegetables came to the table, and what types and quantities of plants others, enslaved people, planted. In his retirement he became more personally involved in the activity, famously writing in 1811. “[T]ho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener.” Jefferson would sometimes come out in the evenings and work in the garden Hughes tended, no doubt encountering the younger man and talking about the whole operation. The two men laid out flower beds on Monticello’s west lawn and worked closely enough together that Jefferson recommended that he be given his freedom.
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Burwell Colbert and Sally Hemings occupied similar places in Jefferson’s life. They had to work together as a team in order to deal effectively with Jefferson, particularly as he grew older. Both were familiar touchstones as the years advanced. Colbert, who was only ten years younger than his aunt Sally, named a daughter after her. Both Hemings and Colbert had come into Jefferson’s personal orbit when they were young and impressionable people who could be molded into the kind of companions that he wanted to have. They belonged to his closely guarded intimate world, though Colbert had a decidedly more public face as Jefferson’s manservant. Wherever Jefferson went during his retirement—to Poplar Forest, to Madison’s Montpelier, to the homes of other friends—Colbert went, too. Hemings’s place in Jefferson’s life was more resolutely private and contained, not at all the kind of thing that either he or his white family would have referred to. Acting as a substitute for a wife, sleeping with Jefferson, and having his children created the ultimate form of intimacy between the two over a very long period of time. Certainly by the time of his retirement, Hemings and Jefferson had a long history together and were well used to one another’s ways.

In contrast to Joseph Neilson (John Hemings’s father), James Dinsmore, William Stewart, James Oldham, and the many other white artisans and workers who came in and out of Jefferson’s life, none of the people mentioned above—Colbert, Hughes, Fossett, and John and Sally Hemings—could leave him unless he was willing to let them go. He was not willing to do that until after he had died. With the exception of Sally Hemings, Jefferson could easily have freed these Hemingses during his lifetime and kept them on as paid workers. John Hemings, Colbert, and Hughes would almost certainly have worked for Jefferson as an employer rather than as a master. Although Fossett did run away, that was under the parameters of slavery. Being the paid head of Jefferson’s blacksmith shop, while continuing to live with his wife and children would have been a different matter altogether.

For all the reasons discussed earlier, it would have been extremely problematic if Jefferson had attempted to free Sally Hemings and have her live at Monticello as his mistress. Jefferson, Thomas Bell, and many other slaveholders used slavery to cover their relationships with enslaved women. The very patriarchal Jefferson could easily rationalize holding Hemings in slavery as keeping her within what he would call the protection of his family. Again, he saw women, slaves, and children as suitably disabled under law, people who should not be free in the way white men or even emancipated black men were free. Given the gender conventions of the day, that Jefferson wanted to maintain control over Sally Hemings, a woman, makes far more sense than keeping control over men he apparently respected. Jefferson knew that all of these men could take care of themselves, and he felt it necessary to hold them in a status that mixed the attributes of the free laborer with those of the slave. He could not, while he was alive, bring himself to follow things to their logical conclusion.

The problem for Jefferson was that giving any of these people freedom would have created the possibility that they could leave him, just as Robert and James Hemings had done in the 1790s. One supposes that if any of the men had tried to leave after Jefferson had freed them, he could have punished them by refusing them access to their spouses and children. Colbert’s and Hemings’s wives were Randolph family slaves, so Jefferson would have had to enlist the aid of his daughter and son-in-law to carry out such a prohibition. That would have required summoning and sustaining over the years an amount of negative energy that was uncharacteristic for Jefferson, since it would have made him look mean and small in the eyes of others, something he always tried to avoid. A freed Sally Hemings would most likely have had to leave the plantation and be out of the constellation at Monticello, if not Virginia. The only way for a man to control a free woman was to marry her, which he could not do. Selfishness and self-absorption seem far too inadequate as reasons for the way Jefferson treated these members of the Hemings family. There is often great power in simplicity, and the simple, terrible fact is that the law vested Jefferson, and other slave owners, with the powers of a tyrant, as he said himself. This domestic tyrant tried to mitigate the meaning of that reality by being as benign as he could. That made it easier for him to see himself as a good man as he indulged his impulses and met his needs—economic, social, and affective—through his control of these family members, to whom he was tied by years of intimate acquaintance, experiences, and blood. He created his own version of slavery that he could live in comfortably with the Hemingses. It suited him. There was never any serious chance that he would have given this up.