The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (10 page)

Wayles did briefly receive a degree of attention in his community, although it was probably not the kind he wanted. For a few astounding weeks in 1766, Wayles’s name appeared in Virginia’s leading newspaper in connection with a sensational murder case. Wayles represented John Chiswell, who was accused in 1766 of killing Robert Routledge during a quarrel in a Williamsburg tavern. Chiswell was let out on bail, causing a firestorm of controversy among the citizenry who believed he had received special treatment because he was well connected. The case split people along class lines. As the lawyer for the accused, John Wayles, the former “servant boy” turned lawyer, merchant, and trader, was on the side of the grandees.
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This already sensational case gained further attention when the president of the Virginia council, John Blair, a man who had twice served as acting governor of Virginia, took to the pages of the
Virginia Gazette
to accuse John Wayles of lying in his deposition recounting the facts of Chiswell’s encounter with Routledge. Wayles denied the charge, but Blair and other correspondents who joined in the fray did not back down. Several more items appeared on the subject, with Wayles being parodied in two awful, and largely incomprehensible (for modern-day readers), poems printed in the
Gazette
. Both attack his veracity, one beginning,

A stanza in the other poem is notable for its reference to Wayles’s background:

The snide reference to him as “the ill-bred Wayles” suggests that people considered him of lowly birth and were willing to play that card when necessary.

Indeed, the tone of some of the criticism was so contemptuous that one wonders if Wayles’s background did not make his critics think they had extra license when attacking him. In one long letter addressed “To Mr. Wayles” and printed in the
Virginia Gazette
, the correspondent, signed “R.M.,” ridiculed Wayles’s complaint that his reputation was being damaged by Blair’s accusation and those of his supporters.

Wayles’s response to the charge that he had lied in his deposition appears in the same edition:

He also included a letter from Thomas Randolph and Richard Randolph supporting his version of events. He went on to say that he had “endeavoured to express [himself] in the most decent terms” to Blair, showed him what he was going to say about the deposition before he published it in the press, and asked Blair to tell him if anything was wrong with it.
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Neither side would relent. Reacting to critical comments about the handling of the Chiswell matter, Wayles, on behalf of the justices who had given Chiswell his freedom, sued William Rind, the editor of the fledgling newspaper who printed some of the negative comments. Wayles lost the suit.
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Rind’s paper had been created to counter what was thought by some in the colony to be the too pro-Royalist tendencies of the Purdie & Dixon
Virginia Gazette
. Ironically, one of the men who urged Rind to start the newspaper (an action he would repeat controversially in a completely different context many years later) was none other than Thomas Jefferson. Six years after this episode, he would marry Wayles’s daughter Martha. The whole business ground to a halt when Chiswell committed suicide while awaiting trial.
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Very soon all references to this matter disappeared from public discussion, at least in the
Gazette
. After all, the Anglo-Virginia colonists had more important things on their minds during the last half of the 1760s, as their relationship with England grew ever more fraught.

A
NGLING LAWYERS, INDEBTED
planters straining to meet their obligations to British merchants, enslaved Africans struggling to survive the cruel realities of their new home, and Anglo-Virginian colonists beginning to chafe at colonial authority were elements in the world outside as Elizabeth Hemings grew to adulthood in the home of John Wayles. Neither her first home at Bermuda Hundred nor the main house at the Forest still stands. We are left to imagine the kind of shelter Wayles chose to create, keeping in mind that he had every reason to build a home that reflected his much-strived-for station in life. Hemings worked in that house, doing household chores other than cooking, as she was too young for that task when she came to the Forest. By the time she had become an adult, another woman held the position of the Wayles family cook.
¹

Hemings’s precise duties are unknown, although it has been suggested—given what happened later in her life—that she served as a nurse or “minder” of Wayles’s daughter Martha. Martha was born two years after her parents’ marriage, a year after her mother had given birth to twins who did not survive. As it has been for most of human history, childbirth was a dangerous event for women. In 1748, several weeks after bearing her daughter, Martha Eppes Wayles died.
²
A young enslaved girl who was used to working in the house would have been considered suitable for the task of looking after a young child, or at the very least for helping an older woman do it.

Whatever her early duties at the Forest, Hemings took on another role five years later, in 1753: motherhood. She gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Mary, when she was eighteen years old. After Mary came Martin in 1755, Betty in 1759, and Nancy in 1761. There is reason to believe that she had a daughter Dolly in 1757, who never resided at Monticello. The father of her first children, one described in later years as a “darker” mulatto was apparently a black man, though no record of his name or status has been found. Family tradition from one of Mary Hemings’s descendants suggests that she may have been the daughter of a white man.
³
Hemings’s pattern of childbearing resembled that of other slave women in Virginia. Eighteen was the average age at which enslaved women gave birth for the first time. Whether because of better diet or the lesser demands of cultivating tobacco compared with sugarcane or other crops, Hemings and other enslaved women in North America achieved fertility rates that allowed for the natural increase of the slave population—unlike their West Indian and South American counterparts. In the critical years that Hemings bore her first set of children, Virginia slave owners became able to keep up with the demand for slave labor without importing large numbers of slaves from Africa.
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With the decline in new imports from the continent, the multilingual, multicultural world of Elizabeth’s African mother began to give way to the culture created by American-born children of slavery. This transformation had lasting consequences for the development of the black community in what would become the United States. The memories of Africa faded more rapidly among blacks born in North America than among blacks carried to other parts of the New World, where the new cargoes of slaves that continued to arrive long after the legal slave trade in the United States ceased in 1808 constantly replenished connections to the African continent.

Hemings’s children, who would eventually total fourteen, were one generation removed from their African ancestry. They were in a sense symbolic in that their individual family lines followed nearly all the various trajectories of black life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some in those lines would become free well before the end of slavery in America (Hemings would live to see this), whereas others would not. Some, facing the enormity of white supremacy, would reject their African ancestry; others would continue to embrace it. These various pathways were forged out of the circumstances of Elizabeth Hemings’s early life.

During the years between 1746 and 1760, Hemings’s place at the Forest became firmly established. John Wayles himself gave a small indication that, at least in his eyes and those of his family, her status was in some way different. By the time he wrote his will in 1760, Wayles possessed many slaves, among them Elizabeth Hemings and a woman named Jenney, who came under his control in the marriage settlement between him and his wife. He singled these two women out for special mention in the document, calling Elizabeth Hemings “Betty” and identifying “Jenney” as the cook. Wayles directed that they, along with twenty-three others not named in the will itself, were to become the property of his new wife, Elizabeth Lomax, whom he married that same year, should he predecease her. Upon her death, they were to become the property of his oldest daughter, Martha, who was twelve at the time.
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That Wayles gave his wife a life interest in Hemings reveals that, while he clearly thought Hemings should ultimately belong to Martha, he was thinking primarily about Hemings’s—and the cook, Jenney’s—usefulness to his wife, not her present value to his daughter. As far as anyone knew then, Elizabeth Lomax Wayles could have lived for several more decades. In that time Martha would surely have grown up, gotten married, and had her own household, and Hemings would still belong to her stepmother. This indicates that, as of 1760, Wayles did not think there was, or did not care if there was, a close association between his daughter and Hemings. He wanted to provide his present wife with a good housekeeper and cook. His daughter, however, may have had different priorities.

Another item to note about Wayles’s will is that he listed Elizabeth with her last name. One of the many ways that slave societies sought to drive home slaves’ inferior status was to be careless about the use of slave surnames, signaling that bondpeople had no families that white society had to respect. Like the old practice among some southern whites of taking the liberty of calling every African American woman “Auntie” or every man “Uncle,” the carelessness about names, both first and last, telegraphed white privilege. Throughout slavery, whatever whites may have thought, many, if not nearly all, slaves adopted last names that their owners either did not know about or acted as if they did not know or care about. To be sure, there were instances where masters and others did recognize slave surnames, which can be found on planters’ slave rolls and in other documents. The origins of these names varied—some came from present or former owners, some were simply self-selected, and others grew out of family relationships.

In European culture surnames signal the paternity of those born in wedlock and those born out of wedlock whose fathers acknowledge them. Children of unmarried women typically carry their mother’s name, which in most instances would have been the woman’s father’s last name. Enslaved women had no legal marriages, and fathers had no rights to their children, so it seems unlikely that Hemings’s African mother had a last name that her white owner felt compelled to recognize and pass down to her daughter.

Given the family’s explanation for why it was named Hemings, there is no reason to believe that Elizabeth herself simply plucked the name Hemings out of thin air and John Wayles abided by her decision so surely that he used it in a legal document. The only other slave mentioned in the will, the cook, Jenney, appears without a surname. This is additional evidence that a man named Hemings did acknowledge his daughter and communicated that fact to Elizabeth’s original owner. Even though the law did not protect slave families, patriarchal views about family construction evidently influenced the way some masters saw them. If a man acknowledged a child, why not let the child carry his last name, even if it meant nothing legally? Law aside, having a recognized last name evidently meant a great deal to Elizabeth Hemings’s family. Sixty-six years after her death, her grandson Madison Hemings would begin his family story by talking not about his African great-grandmother but about the uniqueness of the family’s name, taking care to explain how they came to own it.

W
ITHIN THE DOZEN
years following Martha Eppes’s death, Elizabeth Hemings saw John Wayles marry and bury two more wives. His second marriage, to Tabitha Cocke, produced three daughters: Elizabeth, who would play a prominent and fateful role in the life of Hemings’s daughter Sally; Tabitha; and Anne. After his second wife died, Wayles married Elizabeth Lomax, to whom he was married when he wrote his will, although she died the following year. It was sometime after her death that Wayles took Elizabeth as a “concubine.” Over the course of roughly eleven years, they had six children together; Robert, born in 1762, James in 1765, Thenia in 1767, Critta in 1769, Peter in 1770, and Sally in 1773.
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This set of children represented a further blurring of racial lines, moving branches of the Hemings family tree farther away from the African woman who was by law the reason for their enslavement, toward the Englishman who was the source of their last name. With three white grandparents and one black grandparent, these children were by the racial classification of the day “mulattoes,” Virginia laws making no distinction between various gradations of racial mixture. But by a term that gained wider currency and greater meaning in the nineteenth century, these children would be called “quadroons.” Their racial classification (legal or biological), however, made no difference to their legal status. Like their “darker mulatto” older siblings, these “bright mulatto” children were born of a slave woman. So they were slaves, too.

It would be very hard to find two people who occupied more vastly different positions than Wayles and Hemings—the prosperous white slave-trading lawyer and the Anglo-African female house slave. Given what we know about their world, the idea that these two would have children together seems utterly banal. Their society was set up for such things to happen, with a much touted, but essentially weak, barrier to prevent it. The pervasive doctrine of white supremacy supposedly inoculated whites against the will to interracial mixing, but that doctrine proved to be unreliable when matched against the force of human sexuality. People are prone to having sex, especially when they are in daily contact with potential objects of sexual attraction. That inclination has permeated every slave society, every frontier society, and every colonial society that has ever existed. Virginia was no exception.

Giving a group of males total dominion over the bodies of a group of females and relying on externally imposed notions of race (“I’m superior to her”) and manners (“I’m a gentleman) to prevent them from having sex with those females was always a doomed proposition. That the mixing could be done entirely on the terms of the males, beyond the eyes and the scrutiny of the outside world, only increased the odds that it would happen—either through rape, using outright or implied force, or, in some cases, when the men and women were genuinely attracted to each other.

In all the ways that counted, the Virginia of the eighteenth century was designed to further the interests and positions of men like John Wayles. The opportunity to apply whatever talents he possessed allowed him to make a place for himself that he could never have made in his native England, where neither thousands of acres of land to be parceled out to men of lower or no rank nor a place to exploit the labor of an imported “alien” race existed. Abundant land and African chattel slavery, the engines of Wayles’s success, gave him enormous power not only in economic terms but also culturally and socially. One cannot divorce the power to sell a shipload of slaves at Bermuda Hundred from the power to decide what to do with the slaves who are in one’s home.

Elizabeth Hemings’s place was exactly the opposite of Wayles’s. Slavery, white supremacy, and male dominance—indeed, practically every feature of Virginian society—combined to keep her down. Law formed the foundation of this system, and its role in fashioning Hemings’s oppression and Wayles’s privilege can hardly be overstated. It determined their relative positions during their lives, and, as is often the point of legal rules, its influence has continued down the generations, helping to shape the way Hemings and Wayles are seen to this very day. Specifically, the laws of slavery, of what was called “bastardy,” and of marriage set ironclad limits on Hemings’s capacity to determine her fate and that of her children. These laws had everything to do with how Wayles and Hemings came to have children together, how the society of their time would protect Wayles in his activities as a slave owner, and how that protective instinct would thrive well beyond his life as a sort of patrimony bequeathed to his legal family and descendants, to be used as they saw fit.

Under cover of the laws of slavery, Wayles could sell slaves, punish them, and make them work for no pay without interference from outsiders. He could have sex with Hemings because she was his property. He could produce children with her who would never be recognized unless he chose to do so. She had no power to challenge this situation formally. Because of slavery and the dominant society’s adherence to white supremacy, no one would have believed her had she named Wayles as the father of her children; or, one should say more properly, few if any white people would have admitted belief in her words, especially if Wayles had chosen to contradict them. Doing so would have run counter to one of the chief tenets of Virginia’s culture—that the words of blacks could not legally be used against a white person.
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Thus, blacks were never to be allowed to shape the “official” reality of a white person’s life.

The laws and culture of slavery aside, that Hemings was not, and indeed could not, have been John Wayles’s wife is also crucial to the way their relationship would be viewed by most people during their time and by many in our own. Under law any child born out of wedlock was considered
filius nullius
, “the child of no one.” It was as if the child had dropped from the sky. At the same time, the children of a marriage were presumed to be the offspring of the husband. These were legal fictions and presumptions that deliberately ignored certain unassailable realities: everyone who has ever lived was the child of a mother and a father, a marriage license is no guarantee of biological paternity, and the fathers of children born out of wedlock can actually be known.