The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (94 page)

The white family at Monticello, Jefferson included, had been pondering various ways to avoid a total collapse. According to Martha’s later recollections, Jefferson lay in bed one evening worrying about his financial state when the idea of a lottery for the sale of property hit him “like an inspiration from the realms of bliss.”
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Lotteries had been previously used in Virginia to dispose of burdened private estates and to raise money for public causes. Tickets were sold at low prices with the land as the prize. Then as later, many people opposed lotteries on religious and moral grounds as a form of gambling. In fact, Jefferson himself had publicly positioned himself over the years as an opponent of speculative enterprises. That he resorted to this scheme shows the depth of his fear during this period.

If it is ironic that Jefferson embraced this species of speculation in his most desperate hours, it is also ironic that just two years earlier he had hosted the great French (and honorary American) patriot Lafayette, who was himself in such dire financial straits that he had to borrow the money to come to America. While on his visit, the U.S. Congress, which had already given Lafayette money in 1803, voted to give him an additional $120,000. That was about $13,000 more than what would turn out to be the total amount of Jefferson’s indebtedness when he died. Jefferson, reeling under the weight of his own debts, congratulated Lafayette on his good fortune, saying with an empathy born of true experience that he hoped it would help the Frenchman sleep better at night and give him “surplus…days of ease and comfort through the rest of [his] life.”
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When the bill to allow the lottery was submitted to the Virginia legislature, it was initially rejected. Jefferson’s supporters were stunned. How could the state he had served in so many capacities reject his plea for help, especially since it took no money from the public till? As he recalled, he had come into public service “as soon as of age…in 1764.” Sixty-one years, he felt, should have counted for something. The lottery’s supporters marshaled their forces and reintroduced the measure, which then passed. Jefferson had it in his mind that it would not be necessary to include Monticello in the proceedings. His grandson remembered that he turned “white” when told that the work of his life would, in fact, have to be part of the scheme. That news was made a bit more palatable because Jefferson was assured that he would have a life estate in the house and that his daughter would be able to stay there for two years after his death.
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An alternative plan surfaced to help him, but, in the end, all the exertions were to no avail. Even in the midst of this high drama, Jefferson continued to be consumed with his duties as the rector of the University of Virginia, which had opened in Charlottesville in 1825, no doubt consoling himself in one of the “dreams of the future,” which he famously said he preferred to thinking about the past. Thinking of the past that had led him to this excruciating present was likely unbearable.

The Hemingses had no direct hand in all the plans and designs to save the plantation. Instead, those who were Jefferson’s personal servants were involved in caring for an increasingly sick man. In addition to prostate problems, which had left him in debilitating pain that required daily doses of laudanum, he began to suffer periodically from diarrhea, a fact that he had kept from his white family members, not wanting to alarm them.
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By March of 1826, as he approached his eighty-third birthday the coming April 13, Jefferson knew he was reaching the end. He prepared his will on the sixteenth of that month and then a codicil the next day that granted freedom to five members of the Hemings family. Burwell Colbert was listed first. He was given his freedom and three hundred dollars. Next came John Hemings and Joe Fossett, who were to be freed as of a year after his death, with all the tools of their trade. All three men were given life estates in houses and one acre of land, with the stipulation that they be near their wives and most likely place of employment, the University of Virginia. The will continued,

With this document Jefferson fulfilled the promise made to Sally Hemings thirty-seven years before in Paris. The emancipations of their two oldest children, Beverley and Harriet, had taken place in secret. They simply disappeared into the white world. The emancipations of Madison and Eston were altogether public, and the way their father accomplished this suggests he knew that freeing these two young men might raise eyebrows. As always, the context is important. Talk of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings had never ceased over the years. His overseer Edmund Bacon made it clear that people were paying attention to Jefferson’s actions toward the Hemings children. People in the area noticed, he said, Harriet’s departure in 1822 and attributed it to her being Jefferson’s daughter, and they likely knew when her brother left in the months before her.
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Mixed-race children were the inevitable result of America’s racially based slave system, and freeing these children, if done in a quiet and discreet manner, was considered the “decent” thing to do. That posed a severe problem for one of the most famous persons in the nation, a man who never intended to make a public declaration—explicitly or implicitly—about his enslaved mistress and their children.

Creditors’ interests took precedence over emancipations, so the list of people to be freed had to be very small and the people on it chosen with extreme care. Except for being Jefferson’s sons, Madison and Eston Hemings should, by all rights, have come after their cousin Wormley Hughes and their uncle Peter Hemings, both skilled and talented men. Hemings, after all, was Martha Jefferson’s half brother, whom Jefferson had known for over fifty years. He had freed Peter’s older brothers Robert and James decades earlier. James did not live long to enjoy his freedom, but Robert, who died in 1819, had twenty-three years as a free man. How, then, to explain why two obvious youngsters were on a list with men who had rendered services to Jefferson for more years than the pair had been alive and why others had been passed over? If there is any thought that Jefferson’s mind and instinct for maneuvering were in any way impaired in those final months, his will dispels it.

Jefferson’s language suggests that he was freeing Madison and Eston not because they meant anything to him but because they were connected to John Hemings. He was giving his older valued servant something: their services. One difficulty, however, was that Jefferson almost certainly knew, as readers of the will would not have, that Madison was already past his twenty-first birthday. The condition precedent to his emancipation had already come and gone, and John Hemings would not have his “service.” Eston, approaching his eighteenth birthday, could have served his uncle for three years. But even that was a small reward to John Hemings compared with the lifetime of freedom that Eston would enjoy. Jefferson was a careful drafter, and as a lawyer he knew he could have written this provision in a way that granted the young men freedom if they agreed to work with their uncle until they became adults. Putting this in terms of giving services to John Hemings deflects the question why these young men mattered enough to Jefferson for him to do this momentous thing. As it turned out, neither Madison nor Eston was required to work for his uncle. Jefferson’s family gave Eston “his time” when Jefferson died, instantly abrogating the terms of his will. It is almost inconceivable that the family would have done this without Jefferson’s prior instruction.

We will probably never know what discussions took place between Jefferson and members of his white family who stood to lose if the talk about his enslaved children resurfaced at this critical juncture. Jeff Randolph was still pressing ahead with the plans for raising money from the public to help retire his grandfather’s debt and save his lands. Despite an outpouring of support from many people in Virginia, there remained significant opposition to helping the dying statesman. Hard as it may be to imagine today, given what the institution has become, there was great skepticism about Jefferson’s university, for both economic and religious reasons. He had spent a good amount of social capital in championing what he wanted to be a determinedly secular institution, with a library as the center of the grounds rather than a chapel. He and his family had to tread very carefully under the circumstances.

The beginning of Jefferson’s end started in June of 1826. The story of his final days was presented in the recollections of his white grandchildren, and their reflections illustrate the difference between the slave society that their mother and grandfather had been born into and the one that the younger Randolphs knew. While the Jefferson family memories of Martha Jefferson’s death in 1782 make no mention of the enslaved women who surely helped care for the dying woman, enslaved people played prominent roles in Jefferson’s grandchildren’s recorded memories of his death. Edmund Bacon’s 1857 recollections reflect the change as well. In what was fast becoming antebellum southern society, enslaved people were no longer to be hidden. Instead, the presentation of slaves as integral, intimate members of the plantation “family” emerged as an argument in support of the peculiar institution.

As Jefferson faded, his grandson Jeff Randolph and the others remembered, “he would only have his servants sleeping near him.”
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Randolph makes clear that more than one enslaved person was deeply involved with Jefferson’s care in his final days. That is not surprising. There were more than enough Hemingses to stand watch, and in those intense moments the attention of the entire place was riveted on the man who for over five decades had dominated the consciences, imaginations, and lives of everyone who lived on the mountain. Randolph did not name all the “servants” who attended Jefferson, but it is almost certain that they included, at the very least, Burwell Colbert and Sally Hemings, the only two people said to have taken care of his rooms and him. As is often the case with those on their deathbeds, Jefferson had trouble sleeping, and people took turns sitting up with him during the day and at night. He did not want to be alone, and insisted that his enslaved caregivers make pallets so that they could sleep in the room with him overnight. Only they were allowed in his bedroom after dark, and anxious members of the Randolph family took to making secret forays into his bedchamber to check on their own loved one.
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This is what it had come to. The people who had nursed him from the beginning of his life, whose energies he had harnessed for his own use up until this moment, were now called upon to care for him as he faced his last days on earth—sitting up with him at night, sleeping on pallets around his bed to be ready to hear when he called out in need, in fear, or out of simple loneliness. These African Americans, whom he had sentimentalized as having the best hearts of any people in the world, had given their lives to him—followed him about, cleaned up after him, no doubt worried about him, for his sake and their own—slept with him, and borne him children. He had held them as chattel, trying, in the case of the Hemingses, to soften a reality that could never be made soft. While he claimed to know and respect the quality of their hearts, he could never truly see them as human beings separate from him and his own needs, desires, and fears. In the end, all he really knew of their hearts was what they were willing to show him, and they carried enough knowledge in their heads to know his limitations and the perils of giving too much of themselves in the context of their society. The world they shared twisted and perverted practically everything it touched, made entirely human feelings and connections difficult, suspect, and compromised. What could have been in the hearts of any human beings living under the power of that system was inevitably complicated, inevitably tragic.

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EFFERSON AND THOSE
around him wished fervently that he would live to see the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of his Declaration of Independence. Early in the morning of the Fourth of July, before the sun rose, he called out to the servants who were in the room with him, apparently telling them something he needed to have done. He talked for a while and then went back to sleep. By midmorning, when members of his white family were in the room, he looked over at his grandson Jeff Randolph and tried to communicate a request. Randolph did not understand what he asked for, but Burwell Colbert did. Jefferson wanted to be raised higher on his pillows. After Colbert adjusted the pillows, the dying man was satisfied. About an hour later, Jefferson fell unconscious. An hour after that, he stopped breathing altogether.
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In a coincidence often thought providential, John Adams died later on that same day in Quincy, Massachusetts, uttering before he died, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” The statesmen could not have engineered a more dramatic exit from the public stage, and in the case of Jefferson this stunning turn of events has received more attention than what immediately followed. As he wished it, the funeral of one of the most important men in history was a private ceremony in the graveyard at Monticello. John Hemings had been preparing for Jefferson’s death for days, if not weeks, using the wood he had long been saving to make Jefferson’s coffin. There is no extant record of who prepared Jefferson’s body for burial, but if it was not Burwell Colbert, it was probably female members of the enslaved community, for preparing bodies, like bringing children into the world, was generally considered woman’s work. Wormley Hughes dug Jefferson’s grave. His family members and slaves carried his body to the cemetery for what was a simple ceremony, a gathering of the Monticello community enslaved and free and people from nearby Charlottesville. There was at least one report of acrimony between Jeff Randolph and his father, even in the midst of mourning Jefferson. James Madison did not attend, and two of Jefferson’s favorite granddaughters, Ellen Coolidge and Cornelia Randolph, could not make it home for the funeral.
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