The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (97 page)

Brodie, Thomas Jefferson     Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York, 1974)

Family Letters Project     Family Letters Project, Thomas Jefferson Foundation,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series
, at http://www.monticello .org/papers/index.html

Farm Book     Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, with Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings
, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Princeton, 1953)

Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
    Annette Gordon-Reed,
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy
(Charlottesville, 1997)

LOC     Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

LVa     Library of Virginia, Richmond

Malone, Jefferson
    Dumas Malone,
Jefferson and His Time
, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948–81)

MB     Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826
, ed. James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1997)

MHi     Massachussets Historical Society, Boston

Papers     The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al., 35 vols. to date (Princeton, 1950–)

SH     Sally Hemings

SJL     Summary Journal of Letters

Stanton,
Free Some Day
    Lucia Stanton,
Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello
(Charlottesville, 2000)

TJ     Thomas Jefferson

VHS     Virginia Historical Society, Richmond

ViU     University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville

VMHB     Virginia Magazine of History and Biography

WMQ     William and Mary Quarterly

1.
Willie Lee Rose, "The Domestication of Domestic Slavery," in Willie Lee Rose
Slavery and Freedom
, ed. William W. Freehling (New York, 1982).

2.
Perhaps the earliest-known usage of the phrase, and certainly the most widely disseminated, was the headline for an Evan Thomas article in
Newsweek
published to coincide with Independence Day celebrations: "Founder’s Chic: Live from Philadelphia,"
Newsweek
, July 9, 2001. The phrase and phenomenon have sparked discussions in both scholarly and popular venues. See, e.g., David Waldstreicher, "Founder’s Chic as Culture War,"
Radical History Review
, no. 84 (Fall 2002): 185–94; H. W. Brands, "Founder’s Chic: Our Reverence for the Founding Fathers Has Gotten out of Hand,"
Atlantic Monthly
, Sept. 2003.

3.
Wesley F. Craven,
White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian
(Charlottesville, 1961), 29–30; Edmund S. Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New York, 1975), 49. Although Morgan notes that the first permanent settlers were sponsored by the Virginia Company, "a joint stock company [whose] members hoped for a profit," he allows that those who formed the company at least styled themselves as having a higher calling, but with a spirit and an objective that might offend modern-day sensibilities: bringing civilization to the "heathen savages" while saving the lower orders in England "from idleness and crime." See also Edmund S. Morgan, "Headrights and Head Counts: A Review Article,"
VMHB
30 (1972): 361–71, describing how the system of headrights and land patents promoted "landgrabbing" and resulted in huge concentrations of property in the hands of a very few people; Anthony Parent,
Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia
,
1660–1740
(Chapel Hill, 2003), whose first chapter, "The Land Grab," echoes Morgan’s characterization and gives a detailed and entirely unsentimental description of how land was acquired in early Virginia that shows how many of the great families of the Old Dominion obtained their wealth and positions; and Robin Blackburn,
The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800
(London, 1997), 227, which describes the headright system as one in which, in keeping with the "biblical maxim ‘to him that hath shall be given,’" planters "with capital, and the necessary application," could "accumulate both land and labour."

4.
Farm Book
, 130; "The Memoirs of Madison Hemings," in Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 245; Parent,
Foul Means
, 36; Blackburn,
Making of New World Slavery
, 227.

5.
A plethora of books and articles are devoted entirely, or in part, to the evolution of Virginia’s slave society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; many of them have become classics in American historiography. See, e.g., Morgan,
American Slavery
; Allan Kulikoff,
Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800
(Chapel Hill, 1986); Philip D. Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
(Chapel Hill, 1998). The origins debate has prompted its own line of scholarly inquiry. See, e.g., Winthrop D. Jordan, "Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery,"
Journal of Southern History
, 28 no.1 (Feb. 1962): 18–30; Russell Menard, "From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,"
Southern Studies
20 (1977): 355–90; Alden T. Vaughan, "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,"
VHMB
97, no. 3 (July 1989): 311–54. For a critique of the historical writings about the origins of slavery, see Nathan I. Huggins, "The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History,"
Radical History Review
, no. 49 (1991): 25–48. For a discussion of the debate in the context of legal history, see Thomas D. Morris,
Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860
(Chapel Hill, 1996), 8–14.

6.
Philip Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 9.

7.
James B. Walvin,
Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945
(London, 1974); F. O. Shyllon,
Black Slaves in Britain
(London, 1974); F. O. Shyllon,
Black People in Britain, 1555–1833
(London, 1977); Philip D. Morgan, "British Encounters with Africans and African Americans, circa 1600–1780," in
Strangers within the Realm Cultural Margins of the First British Empire
, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, 1991), 157–219; Ira Berlin, "From Creole to Africa: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,"
WMQ
, 3d ser., 53 (1996): 51–88; Ira Berlin,
Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), chap. 1.

8.
See Winthrop D. Jordan,
White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(Chapel Hill, 1968), 7–11.

9.
T. H. Breen, "Creative Adaptations, Peoples and Cultures," in
Colonial British American: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era
, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Poole (Baltimore, 1984), 202, discussing intellectual historians’ engagements with "study of white attitudes about blacks and Indians," and noting, "West Africans possessed an image of the white man that was extremely unflattering. Blacks seem to have associated the color white, at least on human beings, with a number of negative attributes, including evil."

10.
Ibid., 200.

11.
Philip Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 62–70.

12.
T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes,
"Myne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676
(New York, 1980). The authors argue that there was a "possibility of a genuinely multiracial society…during the years before Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676." Nathaniel Bacon led a group of lower-class whites and blacks in a revolt against his relation by marriage, Governor William Berkeley, and his upper-class supporters. The property-poor rebels wanted land that belonged to a Native American group with whom the white government officials, who had already gathered their large estates in land, had made agreements. This show of solidarity between poor whites and blacks taught the upper class at least two valuable lessons: (1) if they wanted to continue to rule, they had to drive a wedge between the two groups who might have reason to join together against them; and (2) it was in their interest to have a thoroughly subjugated work force, i.e., slaves who would be in no position to demand a share of benefits within Virginian society.

13.
"Whereas some doubts have arisin whether children that are slaves by birth, by charity and piety of their owners made pertakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by virtue of their baptisme be made ffree,
its is enacted
…that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedom; that diverse masters, ffreed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity by permitting…slaves…to be admitted to the sacrament."
An act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage
(Act II, Sept. 1667), in William Waller Hening, comp.,
The Statutes at Large, Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619
, 13 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1809–23), 2:260.

14.
Negro Womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother
(Act XII, Dec. 1662), in Hening, comp.,
Statutes at Large
, 2:170. For an extensive and informative discussion of how Virginians constructed racial and sexual identities, see, generally, Kathleen M. Brown,
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
(Chapel Hill, 1997). This is the theme of the entire work, but chap. 8 deals directly with the time period that laid the foundation for the world that Elizabeth Hemings and her African mother encountered in the first half of the eighteenth century in Virginia.

15.
Brown,
Good Wives
, 132; Warren M. Billings, "The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,"
WMQ
, 3d ser., 30 (1973): 467–74. Fernando was a slave seeking freedom because "he was a Christian and had been several years in England." Key was the daughter of Thomas Key and a slave woman. She brought suit, citing the English common law rule that said that children followed the status of their fathers. Fernando lost his case, but Key was successful after a nonsuit was entered against her opponents.

16.
Winthrop D. Jordan, "American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,"
WMQ,
3d ser., 19 (1962): 183–200. See also Joel Williamson,
New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States
(New York, 1980), 134–35 on scientific racism.

17.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH,
245. Port Anne (College Landing), a mile from Williamsburg’s center, functioned "throughout the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth century as Williamsburg’s major port, linking it to local and European trade routes via the James River." Capitol Landing, a mile to the north, linked "Williamsburg to the Chesapeake by way of Queen’s Creek and the York River." Andrew C. Edwards,
Archeology at Port Anne: A Report on Site CL7, an Early-17th Century Colonial Site
(Colonial Williamsburg Archeological Report, 1987).

18.
Philip Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 81.

19.
Henrico County Deed Book, 1744–48, April 29, 1746.

20.
Henrico Co. Deeds & Wills, 1725–1737, no. 2, part 1, Nov. 17, 1733.

21.
Ibid. Both names recur in the Hemings family line. Sarah appears more frequently, but that could be due to simple preference. For the will of John Wayles, see
Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine
6 (1924–25): 269.

22.
Henrico Co. Deeds & Wills, 1725–1737, p. 277. Cited in note 19 above.

23.
Frederick Dorman,
Ancestors and Descendants of Francis Epes I
(Petersburg, Va., 1992). See, generally, Morgan, "Headrights and Headcounts"; Parent,
Foul Means
, cited above.

24.
Parent,
Foul Means
, 42–47, discussing the "coup" that black headrights were for the "great planter class" for the period their use was allowed, noting that William Byrd and Ralph Wormeley’s "applications accounted for 44.2 percent of black headrights used in patenting land from 1635 to 1699" (p. 44). The practice conflicted with the Board of Trade’s desire to promote homesteads over land speculating, and eventually the practice was outlawed, but not before vast acreages were taken up by large planters.