The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (21 page)

Seeing the “Master of Monticello” break down helplessly in abject misery gave the Hemings women a different picture of him, one that only a handful of people, the several white female relatives who were there, ever got to see. It was an indelible image. This was another piece of information about Jefferson that informed the Hemingses’ understanding of who he was and how they should (and could) deal with him in the future. Enslaved people—actually any group under the control of oppressors—had, for their own welfare, to become adept at discerning the character and temperament of those who directed the course of their lives. It was an essential way to bring some semblance of personal order and self-mastery to their world within a system of oppression.

For Jefferson, who guarded his inner life so closely, to know that Elizabeth Hemings and her daughters had seen him in such a parlous state could only have underscored the notion that members of this family were different from other enslaved people at Monticello, who would never witness so stark and open a display of his vulnerability. He was not the master of everything. Although the Jefferson family did not think it important to note the Hemingses’ participation in the tragedy that had unfolded in the midst of what had been a hard year all around, the Hemingses did not forget this pivotal moment in their history. The person who had brought them to this place was now dead, and they were left to deal with her husband, who now seemed nearly out of his mind with grief. Though Martha’s death did not raise the terrible specter of family disruption by sale, the Hemingses knew that life on the mountain would change. The only question was how.

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M
ARTHA
J
EFFERSON’S DEATH
did indeed mark the beginning of a new life for the Hemingses because it marked a new beginning for the man who owned them. On September 6, 1782, death closed one path to the future, obliterating Thomas Jefferson’s dreams of a particular life in a particular place with “the objects of [his] affection.”
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At the same time it cleared a path that he used to escape from the memories of loss at Monticello. In those agonizing months when thoughts of suicide crossed his mind, he did not know which direction that path would take him or that his soon to be even deeper engagement with the new nation he had helped create would set his inner compass.
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For the next twelve years he would be away on the country’s business, seeing his farm only intermittently, living for periods in American cities large and small, away from the provincial plantation society that had formed him. He would spend five of those years living even farther removed from that society as a resident of a foreign capital, on a belated version of the grand tour.

Elizabeth Hemings and her children moved with the flow of Jefferson’s suddenly altered course of life, and they had to adjust their own expectations and hopes for the future accordingly. During his years of quasi-exile, the family experienced the beginnings of its dispersal—physical and psychological—as some members left Monticello to do work in other venues. Some traveled with Jefferson to cities within the country and abroad, one was sent with his children to live with relatives, some worked in the homes of others, and a few pursued their own interests.

Within two months of Martha Jefferson’s death, James Madison urged the Continental Congress to ask Jefferson to go Paris to participate in negotiations for peace with Great Britain. The request was actually a renewed one, for he had been appointed the year before to serve with, among others, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Jefferson had declined the original appointment, citing family considerations. He had done the same after a previous request in 1776 that he represent America overseas. Martha’s precarious health had prevented him from going both times.
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Now, with no reason to decline and with a very good one to accept—the need for a change of scenery and a new project to lose himself in—Jefferson decided to go to Paris.

The commission came through in November of 1782, and Jefferson immediately set about planning for his trip. His journey, however, was delayed for almost a year and a half, which he spent traveling between Monticello, Richmond, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Annapolis before he was finally able to set sail. The first and perhaps most important family decision he made about his trip, one that could be called fateful for both him and the Hemingses, was to take his oldest daughter, Patsy, to Paris and to send his two youngest daughters, Polly and the infant Lucy, to live with Elizabeth Eppes, the younger sister of his deceased wife. Mary and Lucy, however, did not go alone to their aunt’s home, for Elizabeth Hemings’s youngest daughter, Sally, nine years old at the time, went along as well. The tangled nature of the Wayles, Hemings, and Jefferson families appeared once again in sharp relief in this setting. Elizabeth Wayles Eppes was married to Francis Eppes VI, the namesake and descendant of the man who had originally owned Elizabeth Hemings when she was a child, and the move brought together two half sisters, Betsy Eppes and Sally Hemings.
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Twenty-one-year-old Robert Hemings accompanied Jefferson on his journeys. By 1782 he had traveled so extensively with Jefferson and alone that James Bear wrote of him that “of all the third generation Hemingses…Robert’s life was the least onerous as a bondsman and the most productive as a freedman.”
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Bear was, no doubt, highlighting the fact that Hemings, unlike the vast majority of enslaved people, moved about the country with almost “unrestricted” movement. One says “almost” because Hemings was still at Jefferson’s beck and call. When Jefferson summoned “Bob,” he arrived.

Robert Hemings, his older brother, Martin, to a lesser extent, and his younger brother, James, lived their lives as slaves essentially bound to Jefferson, and when they were not serving him, Jefferson sometimes did not know where these men were. When he was away and planned to return home for a visit, he might write to family members and direct them to find out where Martin was and tell him to be at Monticello by the time he got there. Once, referring to Robert Hemings, Jefferson wrote, “If you know any thing of Bob, I should be glad of the same notice to him, tho’ I suppose him to be in the neighborhood of Fredericksbg. and in that case I will have him notified thro’ Mr. Fitzhugh.” These men had developed lives of their own outside of Monticello and the immediate Charlottesville area. Richmond recurred as a frequent site of their activities. Jefferson wrote to a resident of the town in search of the Hemings brothers: “If you should know any thing of my servants Martin and Bob, and could give them notice to be at Monticello by the 20th. I should be obliged to you.”
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Robert and James Hemings seemed to alternate duties to Jefferson. When one was not available, the other stepped in. After Jefferson was elected to Congress in June of 1783, James rather than Robert accompanied him and Patsy Jefferson through the Shenandoah Valley up to Philadelphia.
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This relatively loose arrangement, and the experiences the Hemings males gained while on their own, seems to have heightened their expectations about what they were entitled to do in life. Theirs was a more open existence that taught them how to function—and that they could function—in the world outside of slavery at Monticello.

Jefferson’s memorandum books during the months he was waiting to go to France record numerous payments to “Bob” for, among other things, household expenses, clothing, shoes, and trips to Wilmington, Eppington, Richmond, and Baltimore. Several entries are particularly significant. On February 1, 1784, while Hemings and Jefferson were in Annapolis, there is a reference—“Pd. Barber for 1.month20/”—and then another—“Bob begins with barber @ 15/per month.” Nine days later—“Pd for barber’s apparatus for Bob/30”—and then a final entry the following day fleshes out the story—“shavg. box for Bob 7/6.” Robert Hemings was in training to become a barber. He had a two-month apprenticeship with a man named Le Bas and was the first member of his family to learn a trade.
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Whether becoming a barber was Hemings’s idea or Jefferson’s is unknown. Being a barber, however, was considered a high-status occupation for men of African descent, during and even after slavery. It was to Hemings’s decided advantage to have a defined skill in a trade that could bring him income. If it was solely Jefferson’s idea, there is no indication how he thought Hemings would use his training, and nothing in the years to come sheds any additional light on the original plan. Whatever the purpose, Hemings gained a new skill that he could use during those times when he was not required to be with Jefferson, which may have been the impetus for the apprenticeship. As things turned out, he would need something else to do for a long time, because Jefferson made another important decision (we do not exactly when) that affected the Hemings family: whenever the final word came that he was to start for France, it would be James, rather than Robert, Hemings who would accompany him.

From the New World to the Old

James Hemings was nineteen years old when he received word that he was going to France. Why Jefferson chose him instead of his brother Robert, who was older and had been the most closely associated with him, is an interesting question. Robert Hemings’s new skills as a barber would have been useful to Jefferson beyond what he knew about being a manservant. Taking him along for what Jefferson expected to be a two-year stint would seem to have been the most natural thing to do. On the other hand, Robert was very likely already a married man, and Jefferson could have been acceding to his desire to be with his wife, something he would do in the years to come. The decision could also simply have been based on Jefferson’s assessment of the younger man’s temperament and potential talent for the profession he wanted to bring him to Paris to learn: James Hemings was going to France to study cooking and to become a French chef in Jefferson’s household there and, when they returned, at Monticello.

We get the first hint of Jefferson’s plan for Hemings in a letter dated May 7, 1784, that he wrote to his soon to be secretary in France, William Short.

Short, who was in Richmond, replied, noting the small amount of time he had “to get Jame down here and to reach Philadelphia.”

That was not the end of the matter. Short wrote again the same day and addressed the issue of how to get Hemings to Jefferson in time to make the preparations for France.

Before Short could finish the letter James returned with an answer.

This exchange reveals important aspects of Hemings’s way of life, his personality, his knowledge of Jefferson, and his relationship with his own family. The young man was living in Richmond, having gotten a place to stay on his own and found work that paid enough for him to support himself—not only to get housing but also to rent a horse for travel. He, like his brothers, knew how to ride and did so routinely. Horses were symbols of power and prestige in Virginia. Most enslaved people, and poor whites, walked to their destinations, sometimes for miles. Hemings, atop a horse, actually saw the world from a different perspective, and was seen in a particular way by the people whom he passed on the road. He had known contacts in Richmond because, as Short looked for a way to relay Jefferson’s message to him, the people he spoke to about Hemings knew who he was, that he was already in town, and where he was staying.

One part of Short’s letter—his statement that it would be “much more secure” for Hemings to travel “under the Wing” of Captain Bohannon—reminds us of the problem with taking too rosy a view of Hemings’s situation. Travel with companions always provides additional security for travelers, but even adjusting for the differences in Bohannon’s and Hemings’s statuses, Short’s notion of Hemings being “under the Wing” of Bohannon for the sake of his security hints at something else: Hemings was in potential danger when he traveled about alone. His youth was probably not the issue. A nineteen-year-old male during that time would not have been seen as requiring another man’s protection to travel.

Hemings, however, was not just any nineteen-year-old male. He was a male slave. The institution of racially based slavery was so entrenched in Virginia that any person of African ancestry was presumed to be enslaved. On that point, Short’s expression of concern perhaps gives us another bit of important information about Hemings. This young “bright mulatto” was exactly that—a very light-skinned person who was also recognizably of African origin. That alone was reason to fear for his safety from the people whom he might meet on the road, particularly as he moved beyond his normal haunts in the environs of Charlottesville and Richmond. Slave patrols sometimes met blacks traveling alone in Virginia and assaulted them physically and verbally. For African Americans like Hemings, meeting random white people on the road, even if not in organized patrols, carried a potential hazard.

The Hemings brothers’ relatively free movement on the roads of Virginia was never totally free, because it took place in a slave society under a regime of white supremacy. Slavery was more than just the relationship between an individual master and an individual slave. The entire white community was involved in maintaining the institution and the racial rules that grew up around it, rules that often required interfering with an individual master’s decisions about how he wanted to handle his slaves. As far as Jefferson was concerned, the Hemings brothers could come and go as they pleased, so long as they showed up when he needed them. The community at large, however, had an interest in the unsupervised travel of enslaved people. As early as 1680, Virginia statutes mandated that slaves who traveled without supervision of a master had to carry a pass. If they were caught without one, they could receive up to “twenty lashes.”
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Virginia passed a law in 1782 providing that slaves who were “permitted to go at large as free or to hire themselves out would be seized and sold.”
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Given these restrictions, the Hemings males may have carried a pass from Jefferson stating who they were and that they had permission to be on the road.