The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (14 page)

As that conflict unfolded and many white colonists in the North and the South sought ways to express their unhappiness with England, they began to fashion themselves ever more urgently as a people under the threat of enslavement by the mother country’s colonial authorities. Although they had extensive, firsthand knowledge of what slavery actually meant, and knew that they were not experiencing its full force, they defined their freedom in relation to the nonfreedom of the Africans whom they were enslaving. The irony of their posture, when real-life slavery was legal in all the American colonies, was noted during the time and has been analyzed almost endlessly ever since, although for its brevity and absolute dead-on insight Samuel Johnson’s justly famous query in
Taxation No Tyranny
remains unmatched: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”
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The “Negroes” in the North and the South, driven and otherwise, immediately saw a connection between their situation and the metaphorical “enslavement” that white colonists said they were trying to escape. Some sensed that the looming colonial conflict might benefit them, and hoped that all the talk about liberty would be a contagion spreading to all parts of the society. How could men who understood the worth of liberty, and were willing to fight and kill for it, keep men and women in bondage? Most blacks, particularly in the South, adopted the view that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” People of their color were actually, not symbolically, bought, sold, and owned. Even free northern blacks were not totally safe in this world, and they well understood the precariousness of their positions. Slavery based upon race greatly circumscribed their lives, since they were part of a group deemed most eligible for enslavement because of their supposed innate inferiority. These men and women looked to the conflicts stirred by the Revolution with hopes for a new future.
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Very early on, enslaved blacks in Hemings’s Virginia saw their struggle as linked to what was going on between their white Virginia masters and the English, and they looked for ways to use the simmering dispute to their advantage. Although held in legal bondage, blacks made up nearly half of Virginia’s population and were always a potential threat to their masters. They knew it, and so did white slave owners. White Virginians were quite nervous about the prospect that the English might encourage an uprising among blacks and, perhaps, Native Americans, who could still seriously threaten from Virginia’s western frontier.

Even before Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, issued his proclamation in November 1775 promising freedom to blacks belonging to rebels who joined the Royalist cause, some enslaved Virginians expressed their willingness to take up arms against their masters. They approached British officials and directly offered to help. If antebellum slave owners and their post–Civil War neo-Confederate descendants constructed an idyllic, fairy-tale version of slavery depicting benevolent patriarchs ruling over loyal and completely contented slaves, pre-Revolutionary white Virginians harbored no such fantasies about their relationship with their work force. Rebellions and rumors of rebellion during the 1750s and 1760s shaped their attitudes about the enslaved work force within their colony. Enslaved Afro-Virginians were an alien group that had to be subdued and from whom labor had to be coerced.
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Against this backdrop, Lord Dunmore, who had lived long enough in Virginia to understand the dynamic between black and white very well, hinted that he might simply declare the slaves of rebels free and perhaps even arm them. This was a nightmare scenario for white Virginians; suddenly they had to contemplate that their move for freedom from the British might result in the freedom of those whom they were enslaving. If they struck at the king and did not succeed, they would remain yoked to England, while being surrounded by their black former slaves. This was never likely to happen. Neither Dunmore nor his masters would have seriously embarked upon a course that might have resulted in the extermination of large numbers of whites in favor of blacks. They wanted to bring the colony back under control, not to destroy it. Human emotions are seldom bound solely by what is realistic, particularly when the most informed view of the possible is from the position of hindsight. In the midst of the turmoil, white Virginians’ fears of what could happen, and how bad it would be if it did, helped shape their attitudes about breaking free from the mother country.

On the night in 1775 when violence actually broke out in Virginia, it was a black seaman who enthusiastically helped to ferry the royal governor to safety. Slaves, male and female, many trailing children, and some from Jefferson’s plantations, ran away to join the British forces. These “black banditti,” as they were called, escaped into the unknown, seeking what they hoped would be a better future. As one scholar of blacks in the Revolutionary period put it, anyone who chose to become involved in the conflict between the colonists and the mother country was likely to “join the side that made him the quickest and best offer in terms of the ‘unalienable rights’ of which Mr. Jefferson had spoken.”
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“Mr. Jefferson” had not yet spoken those words in the years that Elizabeth Hemings first encountered him, but he was certainly preparing to do so. Although he devoted himself during the first two years of his marriage to “personal and professional” matters, Jefferson had “identified himself with the most aggressive group of the local patriots,” working “behind the scenes” to further the cause of the American colonists.
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Jefferson’s involvement in the American Revolution transformed him, his career, and the world at large. It also transformed the personal worlds of Elizabeth Hemings and her family. As they became bound to one of the most well-known Revolutionary figures, they too were caught up in the fallout from the move toward independence.

Elizabeth Hemings was neither a political actor nor a potential soldier, although she had thoughts about the events breaking around her. The enslaved community was generally nonliterate, but nonliterate does not equal nonobservant and nonknowledgeable. Because they could not easily send each other letters, slaves developed a much remarked-upon ability to pass information from community to community while running errands for their masters, visiting spouses on other plantations, or on trips with masters as they visited their friends and family. The Virginia colonists talked of revolution in their homes, committee meetings, and other venues, but there was not much that whites knew that the blacks around them did not know as well.
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Whatever Hemings perceived of these events, more directly personal concerns would have overwhelmed any consideration of the white colonists’ complaints about their circumstances. The really pivotal year in Hemings’s personal life during the decade came before the Revolution started in earnest. Seventeen seventy-three was the year she gave birth to her last child with John Wayles, a daughter Sarah, called Sally, and it was also the year that he died.
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Up until then, the year and a half between the Wayles-Jefferson marriage and John Wayles’s death had been much the same as the years before. She remained a house servant at the Forest. All that had changed was that she was older, with one set of children poised to begin their own lives and another set still young enough to cling to her.

Wayles’s death put Hemings, her children, and other Wayles slaves on an uncertain path. The death of a master was often a calamitous event for enslaved people, but not chiefly for the reason given by apologists for slavery—the slaves’ extreme love for and sorrow at the death of Ole Massa. Enslaved people had a completely practical, eminently personal reason for sorrow. When the master died, the chances of being sold and separated from family members increased enormously. In fact, slaves were most often separated when executors had to settle decedents’ estates. Creditors had to be paid and property divided among the legally recognized children of the owner. Under either scenario slave families frequently ended up separated forever. If any weeping and wailing occurred when slave owners died, the most serious reason for tears was the fear of what might lie ahead.

As things turned out, Elizabeth Hemings and her children were not separated from one another forever, although there was no way for her to have known with certainty what would happen. We are left to ponder the strangeness of her situation. What did Hemings feel after having borne six children by Wayles? There is every indication that she loved her children and that they loved her. The closeness of the family over the years supports this. But what did she think of him? Hemings had lived in Wayles’s household from the time she was eleven years old, and she had a marriage with another man that produced several of her first four children. Wayles seems to have turned to her only after his third wife’s death. He was forty-five at the time, with three wives behind him, and four daughters. He lived for twelve years after his last wife’s death and evidently did not think it necessary to marry a fourth time.

Slave owners only rarely acknowledged their sexual activity with slave women, and the women themselves effectively had no voice. So getting at the nature of the relationships between masters and their slave families is a delicate business. First and foremost is the issue of whether one can call sexual activity between a slave master and a slave—even over a long stretch of years—a “relationship” in the sense we know it. Enslaved women practically and legally could not refuse consent. Certainly the testimony from former slaves and the memory of slavery among black American women makes clear the prevalence of rape during slavery.

While the true-life experience of large numbers of African American women settles the matter for the overwhelming majority of cases, it cannot realistically settle it for every single one. There can be no denying that law and the cultural attitudes that at once inform and arise out of it exert immense control over the lives of individuals. It is also true enough that people do not always see themselves according to what the law and their neighbors say they are. At various points slaves were considered real estate for purposes of property law. At other times they were likened to personal property, like furniture and jewelry—things that could be bought and sold more easily than real estate. It is doubtful that many slaves thought of themselves as anything other than people—people who were oppressed and enslaved, but people nonetheless. Slaves, male and female, constantly tested the boundaries of their existences and had their own personal sense of themselves as individuals within the context of slavery. Without getting too far ahead in our story, the experiences of Elizabeth Hemings’s daughters Mary and Sally offer examples of enslaved women who were amenable to unions with white men who were their legal masters—relationships that worked very much to their advantages and to the advantages of their children and later descendants.

Madison Hemings described his grandfather as having taken his grandmother “as a concubine.” Later he described his mother as having become “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine.” Can we learn anything from his description? To modern readers the term “concubine” conjures up images of the exotic and decadent—oversexed males with multiple females, usually kept in harems, to satisfy their merely carnal urges. In America, before the usage became archaic sometime in the twentieth century, the law defined a concubine as a woman who lived with a man without being married to him. That straightforward definition carried no implication of unbridled sexual license. Nor did it automatically signal how a man and a woman felt about each other, except insofar as people believed that if a man truly loved a woman he would marry her and that not marrying her proved a lack of love. In Virginia, of course, any black woman who lived with a white man could only have been his concubine. It was legally impossible to be anything else.

Examples of case law from Madison Hemings’s Virginia give a good sense of the term’s usage. In an 1857 suit involving a dispute over property in a white family, the judge referred to the decedent as having left part of his estate “to his six acknowledged illegitimate children, and to his concubine one tenth.” In another, a judge observed that “a man was allowed to do for his concubine what he could not do had she been his lawful wife.” In that case, the woman and man had lived together without marriage for a time, and then married, and the dispute involved what this meant for the couple’s creditors. The opinion referred to the woman in question as the man’s “concubine” before marriage and then his “wife” afterwards.
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In other words, “concubine” was a part of the language and terminology of Madison Hemings’s nineteenth-century world. To have called his grandmother a “common law wife” would have been inapposite, because Hemings knew his grandmother was a slave, and thus not “in law.” The phrase “common law” is used to distinguish male-female unions made outside the statutory law of a state or jurisdiction, and defines the range of legal obligations and privileges a state might choose to confer upon a couple living under that arrangement. John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings could never have had a statutory marriage, nor could any legal obligations have arisen between them on the basis of their having lived together. “Mistress” would not have seemed appropriate either, because that term was often associated with women who were “kept” by married men. Hemings’s reference to his grandmother’s situation fits exactly with John Hartwell Cocke’s statement about Jefferson and other widowed Virginia planters and bachelors. They often took slave women as a “substitute for a wife,” the classic definition of the term “concubine” and the one that was used in both Hemings’s and Cocke’s time.