The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (75 page)

Hemings’s dinnerware, however, did not come from the Jefferson family, for the items do not match the records of the types of china the Jeffersons purchased. This is not surprising, given that her sons often worked for themselves and could give her money or buy her things on their own. Her dinnerware was not outdated. She continued to obtain items into the 1790s, favoring popular patterns of the day. For example, some of her porcelain plates were “painted with Nanking II–style motifs” that dated “from 1785–1800.” She seemed to favor blue—even one of the chamber pots recovered was “painted in blue with a floral or Chinese motif”—and she had distinct preferences about the types of ware she used for different purposes. Plates and platters were mainly the more expensive pearl ware and Chinese porcelain, and her tea settings consisted mainly of less expensive creamware. Her pattern of consumption was the reverse of that of William Stewart, whose family spent more money on its tea settings and less on its dinnerware.
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Neiman suggests that the difference reveals Hemings’s and the Stewarts’ individual strategies for “social advertising.” The striving Stewarts used their expensive tea set as a form of display to impress visitors, as the tea party was becoming a mark of a particular form of gentility. Hemings, on the other hand, preferred to impress at meal times, “while tea drinking was more an informal affair.” But it is also likely that the Stewarts’ five children influenced how much money their parents were willing to invest in the plates they used for their daily meals. Fancy tea ware could be safeguarded from rambunctious kids and brought out only on special occasions. As one might expect, given her son’s and daughter’s time in France, wine was also a part of Hemings’s life. Wineglasses and wine bottles, English and French, were recovered from her home. But other than items related to meal consumption, not much else was found at the Hemings site besides “a half dozen upholstery tacks, two buttons, a woman’s brass shoe buckle, and a slate pencil.”
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Hemings had a garden and kept chickens, some of which she sold, along with produce and eggs, to Jefferson and his family, as did every other adult on the plantation, save for her daughter Sally. Given the nature of her relationship with Jefferson, it would have been odd indeed for her to have turned to him and asked, “Would you like to buy some string beans, or eggs, or chickens?” Tending the garden, raising animals, and looking after children may have been the main ways Elizabeth Hemings occupied herself in her declining years.

It is not known precisely what month Hemings returned to the mountain, but an important thing happened that year that made her return understandable. Sally Hemings gave birth to a daughter, Harriet, at the beginning of October.
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Unlike her daughter Betty, who had a two-year-old, Edwin, Sally had no older children to help her during her pregnancy or after her baby was born. She had also lost her first child and may have had some difficulty with her pregnancy and the aftermath—she had, in fact, been sick in the months after she gave birth. That could only have increased anxiety about her and her child. Who better than her mother, a woman who had lost only one of twelve known children, that one well past infancy at age nine, to watch over her daughter as she began again her life as a young mother.

Jefferson’s absences from Monticello between 1790 and 1794 defined Sally Hemings’s earliest experience with motherhood. She had given birth in 1790 at age seventeen, and if he had been with her for any substantial amount of time, one might expect that she, a young woman at the very height of her potential fertility, would have had at least one other child within that period. But he was not at Monticello for any significant length of time. In 1791, he was away eleven months out of the year. He was gone for ten and one half months in 1792 and another eleven months in 1793.
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His return in 1794 marked the real start of their time together in America, and, as we noted earlier, he was seriously ill for long stretches of time, the battles with Hamilton apparently taking their toll physically.

Harriet Hemings’s birth also marked the beginning of another pattern that would adhere throughout Sally Hemings’s life as a mother: her children would bear the names of people who were important to Jefferson. Harriet Randolph, the younger sister of Thomas Mann Randolph, was described as Jefferson’s particular favorite among the females in his son-in-law’s family. She spent time at Monticello in the mid-1790s, in the wake of the Randolph siblings’ estrangement from Tuckahoe after their father’s marriage to Gabriella Harvie. She continued to visit the mountain over the years and came there to give birth to one of her children. In the end, she would have a son named William Beverley, as Jefferson and Hemings did before her, a name that had a very poignant and particular meaning for Thomas Jefferson.
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There is no way to know whether naming this child Harriet was Jefferson’s doing or Hemings’s. But Harriet was neither a Hemings family nor a Wayles family name. Hemings knew and could have liked Harriet Randolph enough to name her child after her—but certainly not more than she liked her own mother, many sisters, and nieces, for whom this little girl could have been named. The Hemingses had a positive mania for naming their children after one another. It was their way of reinforcing family connections in a world that gave no legal recognition to enslaved families. The family continued in this steady pattern over the generations, well into the twentieth century. We do not know the names of all of her brothers’ children, but Robert and Peter each named children after their siblings. Of her five female siblings, Sally Hemings was the only one who did not choose to, or did not get to, name
any
of her children after people in her family. It was not until her children began to have their own offspring that the name Wayles—first John Wayles Hemings and then Ellen Wayles Hemings—came back into her family line. In fact, two of her four sisters who had daughters named one of their own daughters after her. Her brother Peter and her nephew Burwell Colbert named one of their daughters Sarah. Hemings was apparently unable to return the honor to any of her relatives.
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Of course, naming children was important to white people, too. All of Jefferson’s children with his wife had family names. Because his wife shared the name Martha with his sister, it is impossible to say whom the couple’s first daughter was really named for: this was a happy and useful coincidence. The couple’s two youngest children, both of whom died, were in succession named Lucy Elizabeth, a name that combined that of two Jefferson sisters, and Elizabeth, which was also the name of one of Martha’s sisters. The two other daughters, Jane and Mary, were definitely the names of Jefferson’s mother and sister. In the end, the balance clearly favored Thomas over Martha, as all of their children ended up with names that were held by people in
his
immediate nuclear family.
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As with Sally Hemings and her children, this one-sided way of naming a group of siblings was the work either of a woman trying very hard to please a man or of a man who felt his children should bear his mark.

While Elizabeth Hemings’s presence on the mountain allowed her to play the role of helpful grandmother, she was not the only resource available to her daughter. At some point in 1796, eight-year-old Edy Hern moved into Sally Hemings’s household to help look after Harriet. Edy was the daughter of David Hern and his wife, Isabel, the woman who was originally slated to go to Paris with Maria Jefferson. Edy was replaced in 1797 by her younger sister Aggy when she turned eight years old.
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According to Jefferson’s specifications in the 1790s, enslaved children below the age of ten served as nurses for infants and very small children, apparently under the general direction of elderly enslaved women, but this did not require having the child move in with the enslaved mother. Hemings’s duties as Jefferson’s chambermaid and seamstress during this period did not likely require personal nurses for her daughter, particularly not ones who stayed overnight. This arrangement did provide someone to be with Hemings’s child when she was with Jefferson.

J
UST AS
M
ONTICELLO
as a physical entity in the 1790s differed markedly from its later incarnations, the social life of the place during those years was also different. The endless stream (horde) of visitors that marked Jefferson’s retirement years, his passel of grandchildren, did not exist in the mid-1790s. There were many visitors, of course; the hospitality of the age required entertaining guests and putting up travelers who needed a place to stay while on the road. But it was nothing like what was to come. By the end of the 1790s, there were only three Jefferson grandchildren, and Martha and Thomas Mann Randolph were not yet permanent residents of Monticello. The Hemings sisters undoubtedly had things to do, but by far the busiest people on the mountain during those years were Jefferson’s workmen and nail boys, who were putting in motion his dreams for his house and for finding a path toward economic security in his new vision of a more “humanitarian” form of slavery. In those same years, an event in the lives of the Hemings family reinforced the basic impossibility of that vision.

Nancy Hemings and Her Children, Billy and Critta

While some of Elizabeth Hemings’s children were about to or had left slavery and Monticello, another, Nancy Hemings, came back to the mountain in 1795, after a ten-year absence. When Jefferson was in Paris, his youngest sister, Anna, married Hastings Marks. Nancy Hemings and her two children, Billy and Critta, were part of the marriage settlement that Jefferson provided to the couple. Marks decided, sometime in 1795, that he wanted to sell Hemings, and may have been thinking of separating her family. Jefferson’s sister told him of this because she knew that Hemings was an expert weaver and that Jefferson wanted to resume the “business of domestic manufacture.” He noted that Hemings was “34. years of age” and, he believed, had “ceased to breed.”
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He wanted her to come back to the mountain and teach others how to weave, and begin his textile shop. Desperate to avoid sale to an unknown person, Hemings asked Jefferson to purchase her and her family. He flatly refused to buy Billy, who was fifteen, but said he was willing to buy Critta, age twelve, if Hemings insisted—as if there had ever been a chance she would not. In the end, Jefferson bought Nancy, and she returned to Monticello, and his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph purchased Critta. Unlike her brother, whose fate is unknown, Critta was at least within easy visiting distance of her mother at nearby Edgehill plantation, where she became a nurse to Martha Randolph’s children.
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No matter how “close” the Hemingses were to Jefferson, no matter that he viewed some of them in a different light and did not subject them to certain hardships, their family remained a commodity that could be sold or exchanged at his will. As the years went by, the newest members of the family would become even further removed from the original connection that had made the Hemingses special in the first place, and would receive little benefit from their genetic heritage. In truth, Nancy Hemings, who was not a Wayles daughter, was never fully part of that connection to begin with. If she had been, Jefferson would not have given her to his sister. Robert, James, and Sally Hemings, living in whatever metaphorical greenhouse Jefferson had placed them in, could not save all their relatives from the most painful realities of slavery if doing that conflicted with Jefferson’s, or his white family’s, interests. After all, this whole problem arose because he chose to use Nancy and her children as wedding presents for the benefit of his sister. While it is true that he really did not have the money to buy Nancy and her children, and actually bought Nancy on credit, it would not have bankrupted Jefferson to have bought her son, too, or persuaded his son-in-law to purchase the youngster. That the sales of Nancy and Critta happened simultaneously indicates that Jefferson asked Tom Randolph to buy Critta so that she could be near her mother. But, in his view, Billy was essentially an adult, and his ties to his mother and sister did not warrant extra expenditures by him or Randolph.

In September of this same year, Jefferson recorded the deed of manumission he had drawn up for Nancy’s half brother Robert.
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It had taken Robert just nine months to pay his debt to Dr. Stras, and he became the first member of the Hemings family to obtain formal freedom. So, while this event, along with James’s coming emancipation and the birth of Harriet Hemings, helped make a new story of the Hemingses’ lives at Monticello, Nancy Hemings’s separation from her son, Billy, shows starkly how the deeply tragic reality of slavery always remained the same.

O
N
F
EBRUARY 26,
1796, James Hemings received thirty dollars from Thomas Jefferson “to bear” his expenses to Philadelphia.
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This time Hemings was not going ahead to prepare for a Jefferson arrival. In fact, his departure had nothing to do with Jefferson at all. Two years and one month after he had returned to Monticello to train his brother Peter to be a chef, James Hemings was leaving slavery for good. Approaching the fourth decade of his life, he became the second member of the Hemings family to achieve formal freedom.

Although Jefferson had signed the deed of manumission three weeks earlier, Hemings had remained in place, perhaps preparing for his journey and saying a long goodbye to his family. There was undoubtedly much for him to do, leaving a life behind as he was. He would have had to find a place to live, a place to send his possessions, of which there were probably a good number. For about eight of the preceding ten years, he had been a paid employee in Paris, New York, and Philadelphia—places that gave him ample opportunity to acquire things. Certainly all of his belongings that Jefferson had shipped from the Hôtel de Langeac would go along with him now. These were, of course, strictly his own affairs, and Jefferson’s records give no account of Hemings’s preparations for his new life. Indeed, the only thing he left by way of a valediction that we have access to came from his old one: the list he prepared of all his kitchen utensils from Paris that would now be left in Peter’s hands.
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James Hemings’s choice of destination shows how different he was from his brother Robert, either by temperament or by experience. The elder brother was a family man of long standing, having developed a settled place for himself in Richmond, where his wife, son, and daughter lived. His settlement may not have been strictly a matter of choice, for we do not know when the rest of his family became free—whether it was before or after his own emancipation. By all appearances, however, Frederick Stras wanted to help Hemings. He seems like the sort who would have imposed lenient terms for the emancipation of Dolly and their children, for he was trying to unite their family. We do know that in 1802, Robert and Dolly’s daughter, Elizabeth, became a legally married woman, which she could not have done had she still been enslaved.

Even long after all his family was emancipated, Robert Hemings chose to remain in Richmond, instead of seeking a new life in the North. Though nowhere near as populous as Philadelphia, the town did have its attractions. The 1800 census recorded 5,737 residents, which was large by Virginia standards. It was well situated on the James River, with a port that had a long history of shipping farmers’ goods to other American cities and across the Atlantic to England. After it became Virginia’s capital, in 1780, it grew quickly with lawyers and other functionaries of government arriving to take their place in society. Tobacco, wheat, coal, and the production of iron, in state-run industries, fueled its economy.
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Richmond’s large black community, a little over two thousand enslaved and about six hundred free, had created a vibrant culture in the midst of oppression. Some free blacks managed to carve out stable existences, owning shops of various types. Others, like Robert Hemings, had their own fruit stands and hauling businesses.
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Although Hemings was by no means prosperous, he so wanted to be his own man after a life spent acting at Jefferson’s beck and call. We can see that in the image of Hemings—the former “privileged” manservant, now in his midthirties hawking fruit to passersby, braving all sorts of weather, exchanging money and pleasantries, and, on occasion, no doubt, encountering more hostile reactions from members of the public. Martha Randolph remembered seeing him often in Richmond, probably at his fruit stand.

Because of his former position, Hemings could have been, had he wanted to, something of a minor celebrity in Richmond, particularly when Jefferson occupied the highest offices in the country. There is no reason to believe that he would have wanted to divulge secrets about Jefferson, but he wouldn’t have had to go that far to cash in on the public’s desire to be connected to a famous and highly regarded person.
I just bought fruit from a man who used to be the confidential servant of Thomas Jefferson!
Hemings did, in fact, become the object of attention in the town after Jefferson’s life with his sister was exposed by Richmond-based newspapers. It was from that scrutiny of him in 1802 that we learn that he had “some infirmity” in one of his arms, which explains why he did not ply his trade as a barber. By that time he had become a property owner, having half a lot on Grace and Seventh Street in Richmond. Isaac Jefferson recollected that Hemings had his hand blown off in a gun accident. He did not say when this happened, but it seems likely that it was by 1802, which accounts for the reference to his infirmity.
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Jefferson perhaps exaggerated. A missing hand would not likely be termed “some infirmity.”

Hemings was not alone in choosing to work on his own rather than going back into service. A number of freed blacks, often to the great annoyance of white observers who wanted them to work as domestics, preferred precarious lives as vendors, chimney sweeps, and laundresses to going back into the homes of white families on a daily basis. Hemings could have stayed on working for Stras or, with a letter of introduction from Jefferson and Stras, found a decent position in the home of another gentleman. He evidently wanted no more part of the kind of entangling alliances that had so defined his family—even to the point of blood.

Not that Hemings ever completely disentangled himself from Jefferson. Because his own family remained there, he visited Monticello on occasion. In 1799 Jefferson mentioned to his cousin and business agent in Richmond, George Jefferson, that Hemings had promised to obtain for him “a preparation of the lemon juice called in the W. Indies
center
but which he [Hemings] called by some other name.”
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There is no correspondence about this, so Hemings and Jefferson likely talked about the matter when Hemings was at Monticello. Later, when he wanted Hemings to buy him twelve bottles of the drink, he directed George Jefferson to relay the message to Hemings and then pay him for the beverage. After Hemings’s report that he could not find the drink, Jefferson decided to settle on regular lemon juice and asked that some be sent to him, with either George Jefferson or Hemings to buy it and be repaid. A few days later Hemings found the sought-after center, and George Jefferson sent it Monticello. Unbeknownst to George, Hemings had already sent along the lemon juice. He evidently told George this when he brought the news that he found the center, and he also told him that he didn’t expect payment. The lemon juice was, Jefferson’s cousin reported, “
a present from Mr. Hemmings
” (emphasis in the original).
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There are hints, however, that Hemings’s sense of connection to Jefferson went only so far. In that same year, when Jack, an enslaved man whom Jefferson had hired, ran away from Monticello to visit his wife in Richmond, Jefferson wrote to his cousin George on May 18 to make inquiries about Jack. George wrote back to Jefferson on June 3, reporting that he had asked Robert Hemings whether he knew anything of the man and that Hemings said he did not. George then asked Hemings to speak with one of Jack’s former employers to try to find out where he might be, but as of the date of his letter Hemings had not done so.
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Whether or not this was Hemings’s deliberate attempt to be noncooperative on Jack’s behalf, his actions were dilatory and bought Jack that much more time away from slavery. By this record Hemings had no pressing interest in helping the Jeffersons apprehend a slave who had escaped from Monticello.

While free blacks like Hemings enjoyed some breathing room in Richmond, the many enslaved blacks living there also had an unusual amount of autonomy. Historians have long noted the difficulty of controlling enslaved people outside the context of rural plantation life, and Richmond with its large number of hired slaves was no different. The Hemings brothers had not been unique in traveling there to find work in the 1780s. Nor was Jack, the escapee from Monticello, unusual. Virginia’s shift during the post-Revolutionary period, from growing tobacco to growing wheat, altered normal work patterns on plantations. The new crop required less labor overall than tobacco cultivation, creating longer periods when there was no work to be done in the fields. It was in the direct interest of slave owners to have their slaves gainfully employed instead of waiting idly for work on the farm. So they sent them to Richmond to find work there or be hired by other farmers, as Jefferson had done with Jack. These men, and sometimes women, usually turned all or most of their wages over to their owners. A few others, like the Hemings brothers, kept the money. Whatever their circumstances, the people who remained in town gained valuable information about how to maneuver in the world beyond the plantation.
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Their more independent existence emboldened Richmond’s black residents in ways that often discomfited whites. In the same letter in which he groused about Robert Hemings’s plan for emancipation, Jefferson, asking his son-in-law to hire some male slaves for him in the Richmond market for the coming January, stipulated that they be from “the country” and not from Richmond. He did not “chuse,” he wrote, to have men from the city mix “with [his] own negroes.”
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Those Richmond “negroes” would come to Monticello with their city dwellers’ heightened expectations and diverse experiences and wreak havoc in the limited and settled world of rural plantation life. He had had quite enough of that. In the sentences immediately following, Jefferson gave the bitter (to him) proof of the deleterious effects that cities had upon slaves: Robert Hemings, with confidence and contacts developed in Richmond, had wanted to leave him.

The town was, in Rhys Isaac’s description, “a fickle, polymorphous segregated, non-segregated…fast-growing” place, where laborers, black and white, shared space with a much smaller number of privileged whites.
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These poor and middling types were making their own rules in ways sometimes troubling to the town’s more prosperous citizens, who preferred it if each social and racial group stayed in its designated place. At the same time, some better-off whites took advantage of the freewheeling attitude, particularly the great frequency of interracial socializing. Blacks and whites who worked together during the day continued their contact in bars and other gatherings at work’s end.

James Callender, who in six years would become the scourge of Robert Hemings’s sister Sally, spent time in Richmond at the end of the 1790s and early 1800s and was among the most vocal and expressive critics of its milieu. From his position as a columnist for the
Richmond Examiner
, the town’s major newspaper, he railed against the “black dances” and barbecues often attended by white men of all strata of society. The rabidly racist Scottish émigré was outraged to see white men sitting in boxes at the local theater with their black girlfriends. As it turned out, his boss, Meriwether Jones, the editor of the
Examiner
, had a black mistress. When he and Callender fell out over Callender’s exposé of Jefferson’s life with Sally Hemings, Callender dubbed Lewis’s paramour “Mistress Examiner.” Of course, this sort of mixing went on in rural venues as well, but the openness in Richmond violated norms of secrecy-based decorum. It was one thing to carry on these liaisons with black women in the privacy of the home, quite another to appear with them in public.
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While the needs of the domestic economy and cultural mores shaped the social and racial climate in Richmond, news from the outside had an impact as well. Two world-defining revolutions—in France and Saint Domingue (Haiti)—put the issues of liberty and slavery into the public discourse in the most profound way—an especially important and difficult conversation in a fledgling country conceived in both liberty and chattel slavery. The two events had different implications for white and black Americans. Fresh from their own break with a monarchical system, most white Americans initially supported the French Revolution. As noted earlier, while James and Robert Hemings were in New York in 1790, those calling for the abolition of slavery, black and white, linked their struggle to the spirit of ’89 in France. After the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793 and the excesses of Robespierre, the mood changed. French émigrés escaping the Terror brought news of France’s spiral out of control, furthering skepticism about the new day dawning in the country of America’s first ally. France and its revolution galvanized politics at the national level for all of the 1790s.

Saint Domingue, which came quickly on the heels of the French uprising, was a different story from the start, at least for many whites. The 1791 uprising there, and subsequent battle for control of what had been France’s richest colony, raised the specter of slave revolts in the South. Although the United States had been born because Americans had fought—killed and been killed—to secure their liberty, many white Americans were alarmed about Saint Domingue. The black rebels apparently did not understand. Whites could fight and kill other whites for their freedom, and they could certainly fight and kill nonwhites for it. Blacks, however, were
never
to fight and kill whites for their freedom—their liberty not being worth that particular cost. Speaking of the evils of slavery in the abstract, instantly abolishing the institution in places with minuscule numbers of blacks, and enacting gradual emancipation plans along timetables suiting the needs of whites, kept the notion of white supremacy firmly in place. What was happening in Saint Domingue was altogether different, and the image of empowered blacks taking freedom on their own terms was a nightmare scenario for Jefferson and most other whites.