The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (12 page)

It is instructive that white Virginians’ expressed disdain for interracial sex did not lead them to outlaw it more specifically in the context of the master-slave relationships that so obviously posed the greatest danger for the crossing of racial lines. Had the will of legislators been strong enough, they certainly could have taken such an action. They did not. The difficulty of enforcement does not explain their failure. Laws are sometimes put on the books not for purposes of strict enforcement but as statements about the community’s values. Nor does the value Virginians placed on the sanctity of private property provide an adequate explanation. Throughout history even societies deeply committed to the right to property have enacted limitations on its uses when some other important competing interest was at stake. If its members really considered interracial sex so vile and destructive of public morals, the Virginia legislature could have passed laws specifically designed to outlaw interracial sex in the places it most easily thrived—the homes and plantations where Afro-Virginians lived in daily contact with whites.

It seems, then, that hostility toward racial mixing did not constitute an important enough interest to justify meddling with the notion that slave owners had absolute property rights to their slaves. As a result of this determination, the people who ran afoul of the state’s laws regulating sexual activity—which pulled in whites who engaged in sex across the color line—were almost invariably members of the lower classes. Lower-class people’s overrepresentation in prosecutions involving interracial fornication fueled the shibboleth that only “low status” people engaged in sex across the color line. So might a not very insightful observer conclude. In much the same way, a historian from the twenty-second century who looked back at American society at the end of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and concluded that middle-and upper-class whites did not take illegal drugs, because the overwhelming majority of people in prison for drug offenses were people of color and lower-class whites, would have missed a central reality of those times. Without understanding that deference to middle-and upper-class whites kept them out of the legal system, and without a commonsense understanding that poor people of color alone could not possibly have supported a multibillion-dollar drug industry in the United States, the truth would have been lost. The response to sex across the color line during John Wayles’s time offered Virginia society an extremely useful narrative. Because there was no chance that a slave owner like Wayles could be penalized legally for producing children with his slave Elizabeth Hemings, his activities would never see the “official” light of day. Linking interracial sex with low-class criminality (through legislative choices and in the stories white slave owners told about their world) helped hide the behavior of the “best” of white society.

It is impossible to say exactly when the social knowledge of Wayles’s relationship to Elizabeth Hemings and her children entered their community. By the time of the Chiswell affair, Wayles was fifty years old, and Hemings had given birth to his two oldest sons, Robert and James, who were both under five years old. Public references to Wayles as the father of Hemings’s children appeared in a newspaper in 1805, long after his death, and in the reminiscences of Isaac Jefferson, in 1847, and in those of Madison Hemings, a Wayles grandchild, in 1873. In addition, historians have accepted the Hemings-Wayles connection for a variety of reasons that appeared after the time the two were together at the Forest. Specifically, observations of the way Hemings and her children were treated after they came under the ownership of Thomas Jefferson lent support to that conclusion.
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From the very start, in ways that will become clear in large parts of the rest of this work, Jefferson viewed Elizabeth Hemings and all those connected to her in a light different from the one in which he viewed other enslaved people. Her children by Wayles did not drop from the sky; they were not the children of no one in Jefferson’s eyes. His response to them, and the way it set the family’s course in life, shows slavery as the immensely tragic and complicated institution that it was.

W
HEN
T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
began visiting the Forest at the beginning of the 1770s, he could scarcely have imagined that the names Jefferson and Hemings would be forever linked in the pages of history. Elizabeth Hemings herself would have found such a possibility unimaginable. Although she knew the role that slaves played in the lives of whites, she would have had no reason to believe that the world might someday pay attention to that. And even if the young man who came courting John Wayles’s daughter had any inkling that succeeding generations might know his name, the idea that the names of enslaved people would live on as well ran counter to every tenet of the world he knew. Lower-status people (and slaves were at the bottom of the social strata) were not seen as wielding the kind of influence that would make their lives worthy of notice. Certainly few white slave owners would have acknowledged that those whom they enslaved shaped their lives. Society gave Elizabeth Hemings and her children no power to direct the course of John Wayles’s life or that of his white wives and children. Yet their very presence influenced the lives of those around them, and a household that included the master’s mixed-race children had issues that were not present in households without them.

Consider Martha Wayles Jefferson’s life. She, like her father, remains something of a cipher, a person whose face can exist only in the imagination for, unlike many other women of her class, she did not sit for a formal portrait that remains extant. There is not even a family story (that has been shared with historians) about when and how she and Jefferson met. That they did meet was no surprise. Theirs was a circumscribed world, small enough for the local post office to run a notice in the
Virginia Gazette
like the one in 1767 announcing that “Patty Wayles” (Patty was Martha’s nickname from girlhood) had a letter awaiting pickup.
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Only one letter from Martha Jefferson’s hand survives, along with a set of household accounts that she made as the young mistress of Monticello.
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We know her chiefly from Jefferson’s few references, some brief comments of people who met her as his wife, and the family stories told mainly by a great-granddaughter born decades after she died. Even if there were more written material by or about her, there is virtually no chance that any of it would have ever referred to her mixed-race half brothers and sisters and their mother. Nor is there anything to tell us, for that matter, what she thought of her father, who had brought them into her life. We are left to infer her feelings about her early family life from what we know of the choices she did and did not make, as well as the actions of the man who became her husband. By every indication, Elizabeth Hemings and her children remained close to Martha until her death. She chose to have them around when she could have chosen not to, installing in her own household her father’s slave mistress and the children they had together. Jefferson, taking a cue from his wife’s responses, kept faith with his wife’s choice and continued the connection with the Hemingses until his death.

Martha’s soon-to-be husband was no stranger to the ways of life in slave-owning Virginia. Thomas Jefferson was born at his father’s plantation, Shadwell, on April 13, 1743, under the Old Style calendar, April 2.
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His father, Peter, a wealthy man who made a name for himself as a land surveyor and planter, rose to positions of leadership within his community. He was among the first of the group of Virginians who pushed the frontier west, away from the Tidewater plantations near the Chesapeake into the interior. Peter Jefferson, much loved and admired by his first son, died around age fifty when Thomas was fourteen years old.
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Because of the times he lived in, his discipline, and his business acumen, Peter Jefferson had been able to provide a very privileged life for his family without going into debt, in contrast to many other members of Virginia’s gentry. He died leaving assets and no liabilities to his children.
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On the other side, Jefferson’s mother, Jane, was a Randolph, a family more numerous and socially prominent than the Jeffersons. She lived another nineteen years after her husband and saw her son begin his life as a public man. Because he did not write about her with the same feeling as he wrote about his father, and because as a teenage boy he reproduced excerpts from poems and other literature that can be interpreted as hostile to women, it has been suggested that Jefferson did not care very much for his mother. Fire destroyed his boyhood home at Shadwell, engulfing letters or diaries that may have given a clue about what they meant to each other. His failure to write about her in any detail in the years after her death has led one Jefferson biographer to suggest, rather extremely, that Jane Jefferson was a “zero quantity” in young Thomas’s life.
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He placed the misogynistic excerpts in his commonplace book at a time when he had not been out in the world long enough to have gained any creditable knowledge of the opposite sex.
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What women did he really know besides his mother and sisters? He adored his older sister Jane and seems to have gotten on well enough with his other sisters, leading some scholars to conclude that the more likely target for his adolescent resentment was his mother.

What the youthful Jefferson chose to put in his commonplace book probably distorts the view of his feelings about his mother. His relationship with her could indeed have been complicated. But while he was almost surely angry with her at times (completely natural in any event, but certainly for a boy trying to carve out a separate masculine identity for himself), that does not mean he did not love his mother deeply. Peter Jefferson died while Thomas was too young to have begun the process of separation and could more easily stay an idealized figure in his son’s eyes. Jane Jefferson, the parent who remained, may have for a time borne the brunt of her eldest son’s grief at the death of his father. While Jefferson’s true feelings about his mother cannot be recovered through his extant writings about her, failure to write more, and the snippets of literature he copied down, his actions are more telling. He lived with her past the age of majority, when he did not have to. When she died, he was physically ill for weeks with one of his stress-induced migraines.
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Whatever Jefferson felt about his mother, there is little doubt that her family name gave him a tremendous advantage in Virginia’s pre-Revolutionary society and created connections that would last a lifetime.

To say that Jefferson began life on the frontier of Virginia perhaps creates a mental image of him in a plainly furnished residence, wearing homespun clothes, surrounded by enslaved people whose circumstances were only marginally worse than his own. As Susan Kern has shown, archaeological work done at Shadwell, combined with her careful look at the family’s inventories, and new insights from the work of social historians who have studied the ways of the gentry during Jefferson’s early years, indicate that the young Thomas lived a very comfortable existence as one of the wealthier members of his society.
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Jefferson’s tendency toward extravagant living has long been noted, and criticized, by some of his contemporaries and, later, by historians. He clearly wanted, and expected to be able, to live in a beautiful environment, filled with beautiful objects and rarefied things. That habit of a lifetime began early.

Though the main house at Shadwell was not very large and in no way rivaled the house his son would build and call Monticello, or some other Tidewater plantation houses, in terms of size, it was “fashionable” in that Peter Jefferson designed it for the kind of entertaining and presentation that socially prominent families of the period thought necessary. He could accomplish this because the Jeffersons, though located on a frontier, really did not live in isolation. Their home on the Rivanna River gave them direct access to overseas markets, both for shipping tobacco and for acquiring consumer goods, and they took full advantage of their position. Indeed, Peter and Jane Jefferson filled their home with fine linens, silverware, and furniture ordered from well-known merchants. The couple bought cloth imported from “England, India, and Ireland” and shoes from England for their children, and had their clothes handmade by tailors, thereby developing in their son an aesthetic sense that he carried with him all his life—how things looked mattered a great deal to him.
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Not only did the Jeffersons consume like wealthy people; their attitude about work mirrored that of the wealthier class. While Jefferson’s mother and sisters had spinning wheels and sewed, they did not, as did some other plantation mistresses, take primary responsibility for sewing clothing for the family’s slaves or even knitting their own family’s stockings. They paid other women in the community to do this work, apparently reserving their womanly skills with the needle and wheel for largely recreational purposes.
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As an elderly man, Jefferson recalled that his first memory was of being handed up on a pillow to be carried by a slave on horseback.
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Early in their lives, each of the Jefferson children received an enslaved child to serve as a personal attendant, establishing Thomas’s lifelong habit of associating with blacks in the most intimate circumstances. In a letter to a boyhood friend, Thomas, after noting that it was late and that his candle was about to go out, mentioned casually that his “boy” had gone to sleep and that he was about to do the same himself.
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He could well have been referring to Jupiter Evans, born the same year as he. Susan Kern has suggested that an enslaved woman probably served as a wet nurse to the infant Thomas. Evans’s mother is a likely candidate. Isaac Jefferson referred to this as being “one year’s child” with another infant.
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Jupiter played the role of boyhood companion to Thomas until the inevitable time that Thomas began serious preparation for the role he would play in life and Jupiter fell into the role destined for him. An enslaved black woman would have been responsible for the daily care of the Jefferson siblings. From his earliest days Thomas was used to having a black person nurture him, follow him around, give him things, smooth the way, and make sure that the mundane things in life were taken care of so that he could concentrate on doing only those things he cared to do. It turned out that he had a lot of things he cared to do, and his ability to do them derived from his astral talent and tenacity and the enormous reservoir of help (slaves) at his disposal.

Unlike some other sons of the planter class, Jefferson was not sent to study in England, but received the best education that Virginia could offer, and he made the most of it. Ambitious, brilliant, and hardworking a young man as he was, he could not have foreseen the heights to which he would rise, because those “heights” did not exist. Although it was clear by the time he fixed his eye on Martha Wayles Skelton that trouble between Virginia and the mother country loomed on the horizon, he could not have imagined how the struggle would turn out and the role that he would play in it. Even without knowing that, he had every reason to believe in the brightness of his future.

Uncommonly tall, a little over six feet two inches, Jefferson remained slender all his life—one of the overseers at Monticello likened him to a racehorse with “no surplus flesh.” His hair was red, but from the descriptions of his sister Martha Carr, James Madison, and Isaac Jefferson, he was “a light red head” with hazel eyes.
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He had remarkably good teeth for that era, but seldom showed them when smiling, a mark of his reserve in public venues. Though his overall countenance was “pleasant,” views differed about whether he was handsome—some people found him very much so, and others, not. The most attractive things about him, and what Martha Wayles Skelton would have seen, were his obvious intelligence, extreme good manners, and capacity to talk with people in ways that set them at ease. As Thomas Worthington, a Jeffersonian Republican who went on to be the first senator from Ohio, put it, there was no requirement for his company other than being polite.
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His capacity for friendship bound people to him, male and female, but he was especially good at gaining the sympathy of women, perhaps from having grown up chiefly among sisters.

Jefferson possessed a curious and, in the end, enormously creative and effective combination of stereotypically masculine and feminine traits. He was an architect and builder who loved, he said, nothing so much as “putting up and pulling down” and being among, in his son Madison’s words, “his mechanics,” the people who transformed wood and metal into usable forms and objects.
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Men of his class often disdained anything that suggested physical labor. But he actually loved the sensation of working with his hands—on his own terms, of course—much like his mother and sisters, who sewed for their own recreation, but were not serious providers of services to their nuclear family or slaves. He made keys, kept his own set of carpenter tools, and occasionally tried his hand at making furniture. His sons Beverley, Madison, and Eston were placed under the tutelage of their uncle John Hemings to become carpenters, the type of “mechanic” with which he most closely identified.
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A lifelong lover and collector of gadgets and measurer of things, he kept in his pockets a compass and memo pad, which he could take out at a moment’s notice and record some observation. A physical man, he loved horseback riding and tests of strength, so long as they did not involve hurting anyone. Like his father, he was inordinately strong for a slender person. And though he never seemed to figure out its exact application to economics, he loved mathematics in his youth and returned to that discipline for amusement as an older man.
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