The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (15 page)

We cannot know, given the present state of information, exactly what went on between Hemings and Wayles beyond the facts that he was her master, she was his slave, and they had six children. Unlike her daughters Mary and Sally, Elizabeth Hemings took no known actions that telegraph what she thought about John Wayles, what she told her children about him, and what he thought of her. It may be instructive that at least two of Hemings’s grandchildren gave some version of John Wayles’s name to their own children, keeping the Wayles connection alive beyond whatever was the story of Elizabeth and John. Not every mixed-race family followed that practice. Many wanted absolutely nothing to do with the white males who were their biological fathers or grandfathers, feeling no desire to memorialize these men by naming their children after them. These men, and the connection to whiteness, were to be buried along with the institution of slavery. At least some of the Hemingses chose a different path.

One admittedly imperfect way to approach the possible nature of a slave owner’s relationship to his enslaved biological family is to look at how the men treated the children from these unions. Their actions must be viewed along a continuum. At one end were men, a rare few, who acknowledged their children, freed them and their mothers, and made provisions for their futures. The vast majority of white men who had children with enslaved women did not do any of these things. They neither freed nor acknowledged their children, and by their actions—or inaction—showed that they could not have cared less about the mother or their offspring. One thing about the Wayles children is of note in this regard. We know definitely that two of his children with Hemings, if not all of them, knew how to read and write. Robert Hemings’s letters to Jefferson are no longer extant, but James Hemings’s writings show great proficiency. One wonders who taught them.

It is not impossible, but would seem improbable, that Jefferson had any direct hand in this, that he taught them to read and write once they came into his life. Although they were certainly able to serve him better because of their literacy, there is no indication that Jefferson felt this skill was so important to him that he would take the time to teach them. It seems more likely that Hemings’ children learned to read when they were still in their father’s household. Either John Wayles himself or their sister, Martha Wayles Jefferson, was the possible source of their literacy. John Wayles had been able to rise in the world because his illiterate grandfather had made sure that his sons and daughter received at least a basic education. He was also an apparently religious man, or at least he took the trappings of religion seriously, attending services regularly and involving himself in the affairs of the congregation. A number of slave owners, under the influence of religious beliefs, taught “favored” slaves to read so that they could study the Bible. This might explain why Wayles remained an important figure to the family, even though he did not free his children. His grandson Eston Hemings named his first son John Wayles Hemings.

It is impossible to know Wayles’s thoughts about freeing his children. On the one hand, he may have had no consideration of freeing Elizabeth Hemings and his children at all. There is little reason to believe that a man who could involve himself so directly in the African slave trade, knowing the deaths he was purchasing in the process, would necessarily feel sentimental about his enslaved children or their mother. Pleasant as he may have been to his white neighbors, Wayles was a hard man. On the other hand, Wayles died before Virginia’s post–Revolutionary War liberalization of its emancipation laws. The statute of 1723 was still in effect when he died: “no negro, mullatto or indian slaves shall be set free upon any pretence whatsoever, except for some meritorious services, to be adjudged and allowed by the governor and council.” The statute went on to say that if a master tried to free a slave, “the churchwardens of the parish” could “take up, and sell the said, negro, mulatto, or indians, as slaves” and keep the proceeds for the benefit of the parish.
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To free Hemings and their children, Wayles would have had to convince the governor of Virginia and the Virginia council that they had performed some “meritorious services” to him. That would have been a tough sell, and the man who apparently started in the colony as a servant and had been raised to a point where he could marry the daughters of the upper classes may not have wanted to press his luck much further. Moreover, what Elizabeth Hemings had “done”—save Wayles from a lonely existence as a widower—was more his doing than hers, and it probably was not what the burgesses had in mind when they required “meritorious services.” Wayles’s small children could not have fit the bill either. Instead of being emancipated, all the Hemingses ended up as the property of Wayles’s son-in-law Thomas Jefferson, and it was through him that the Wayles-Hemings children reaped the benefits of their paternity.

It took until January of 1774 to settle John Wayles’s estate, dividing property among his legitimate heirs. The Forest was now occupied by Wayles’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Francis Eppes. As the division proceeded, and the Wayles heirs sorted out what was theirs, human and non-human, Elizabeth Hemings and her children—Nancy, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally—and her grandchild, Daniel Farley, the son of Mary Hemings, were sent to live at “Guinea,” a Wayles farm in Amelia County. They stayed there until Jefferson moved them to another farm, Elk Hill, in Goochland County. He took several of her older children to live at Monticello. Mary, the eldest, served as a seamstress and pastry cook for Jefferson’s family. Martin became Jefferson’s butler and would remain in that position for twenty, somewhat tempestuous years. Betty (whose last name was Brown) became a house maid—she was actually the first to go. Two of Elizabeth’s Wayles children came along, too: Robert and James. Not long after this period of transition, the entire Hemings family was reunited when Elizabeth and the rest of her children were brought to Monticello, which became their principal home for the next five decades.
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W
HEN THE HEMINGSES
assembled at Monticello, they entered the somewhat quixotic dream world
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of their new owner. Jefferson was already five years into his determined effort to build and constantly improve his home in the sky, an effort that would continue almost unabated for the next five decades. In the early years, Jefferson referred to his emerging homestead as the “Hermitage,” but soon settled on the name Monticello, “little mountain,” to describe the place where he would make his home.
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Living there was a reverie of long standing for him. But the space on the mountain and the structures he built there (two different versions of the main house at Monticello would emerge) represented much more than a mere residence. In ways both intended and unintended, Monticello became an almost perfect projection of Jefferson’s personality—his vaulting ambition, his respect for and adherence to aspects of a classical past, his faith in innovation and optimism about the future, his extreme self-indulgence, and his genius.

There was something else. The historian Rhys Isaac has written eloquently about the “possible meanings” of Jefferson’s choice to build his home where he did, atop a mountain separated “from the corn and tobacco culture that paid for its buildings.” He also set himself apart from “the African-American communities” that populated his estates, from the “women who nurtured him in his infancy, and whose youngsters had been his companions.”
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Monticello, the “home” plantation, towered above Jefferson’s immediately surrounding quarter farms, Shadwell, Lego, and Tufton. Isaac astutely raised the core predicament of Jefferson’s existence. His love of his country, Virginia, and his ambivalence about the institution central to the life of that colony, and then state, emerged as a constant theme throughout his life. This man who wanted desperately to be seen by his contemporaries and posterity as a progressive had a way of life that depended upon what ultimately was—and he took to be—a retrogressive labor system. Certainly Jefferson’s years in Paris were among the happiest in his life in part because he could live there as an enlightened aristocratic gentleman without depending upon the labor of enslaved people. In Dumas Malone’s words, in Paris, Jefferson “was able to be the sort of man he wanted to be.”
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Having absolutely no will to divest himself of his human property, Jefferson was in a bind. There were, however, examples of very prosperous Virginian slave owners of his class who did relinquish their property rights in human beings and freed their slaves. But religion strongly influenced these men, and Jefferson, a creature of ethics, was not like them. Throughout history, religion has been the source of many an “irrational” act, for both good and evil. The ethical sense has never been so good at exciting passionate, caution-thrown-to-the-wind actions. And certainly by the standard of any age, the act of voluntarily giving up the entire basis of one’s wealth that could be passed on to one’s children would be considered irrational. That slaves were human property is an issue that naturally concerns us in the twenty-first century very much. It did not, to any great degree, concern members of Jefferson’s generation in Virginia, or else they would not have held slaves.

Operating under the constraints of his personality, Jefferson opted for a different course: one that allowed him to continue to espouse the progressive belief in emancipation, thus holding on to his very deep need to be seen as an intelligent man of the future, while maintaining the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. Though he understood viscerally that slavery was wrong, he resigned himself to the institution and rationalized that the project of emancipation was best left to future generations, his revolutionary generation having done its part by creating the United States of America. The debate about the best course of action regarding slavery would remain for him largely a political abstraction, carried on in the republic of letters. But what was to be done about the problem on a day-to-day basis? With the help of architecture and landscaping, Jefferson arranged his personal life to minimize the reminders of his entanglement with African slavery. He took to the mountain with his wife, surrounded himself with enslaved people—some of whom, his wife’s blood relatives, he could treat as something other than slaves—and set about creating his own world with them.

For most people the word Monticello invokes an image of the second house that Jefferson built atop his 867-foot “little mountain.” It is, perhaps, the most well-known private residence in the United States—the only one to appear on a piece of U.S. currency. Less often thought about is what it took to build the place and to provide an adequate lifestyle there. Other planters built homes with fine views that required a great amount of work to construct and maintain. Situating a house at Monticello presented not only unique problems but also familiar ones on a far greater order of magnitude than was typical.

First, building the house required shaving the top off the mountain, a huge earth-moving enterprise in an era that had neither earth movers nor bulldozers, at least not mechanical ones. Human beings, slaves Jefferson hired from a nearby planter, engaged in this massive effort, digging with shovels in Virginia’s hard red clay to level the ground and then digging a foundation and cellars for the house. This was backbreaking work carried out over twelve-hour days. On one occasion Jefferson observed as “a team of four men, a boy, and two sixteen-year-old girls” worked. It was winter. There was snow on the ground, it was extremely cold, and the laborers periodically stopped their digging to warm their hands over a fire before they returned to their arduous task.
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There was no ready water supply on top of the mountain. A well had to be dug, an especially difficult undertaking, because the workers were required to dig deeper to find water than they would have had to if they been digging on level ground. It took them forty-six days to excavate sixty-five feet of mountain rock before they hit water, almost twice the depth of a normal well in Virginia. Even with that, at times when not enough rain fell to provide a constant and ready supply, water had to be hauled up the mountain.
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Jefferson did not consider these issues a serious problem. From his perspective, as from that of any man of his class, his tasks were to imagine the design for his life on the mountain, engineer ways to execute the design, and then find people—slaves and hired workmen—to complete his projects. As long as labor was available, the job would be done.

The first Hemingses who came to Monticello with Martha Wayles Jefferson in 1772 saw a dwelling that was still in a very rudimentary state. Martha and Thomas Jefferson began their married life in the South Pavilion at Monticello, the one-room building—the first at the site—that Jefferson built while still a bachelor. They ate and slept in the room that housed his books, the furniture, and their clothing.
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Fifteen-year-old Betty Brown, who served as Martha’s maid, was apparently the very first Hemings to arrive; as fate would have it, she would be the last one to leave the mountain.
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Indeed, she likely accompanied the couple on their much written-about winter journey to the mountain, though no mention is ever made of her. Members of Jefferson’s class did not generally travel by themselves, and certainly a bride going to her new home would not have left her personal maid behind, for there was much to do to create a new household. We have no indication where young Betty or the other later-arriving Hemingses stayed. Nor do we know where the rest of the family members lived when they were all brought together in 1775. It would not have been a difficult task to build cabins to house them, although one wonders how a couple living in such small quarters could have made use of a butler, two maids, and two other personal attendants. The only plausible explanation is that the Jeffersons set out right from the start of their life together to live as if they were in normal circumstances—entertaining family and friends in their small quarters—since it was a given that it would be some time before their family home was finished.

This marked a dramatic change for the Hemingses. Elizabeth Hemings had grown up serving in two well-established households, the Eppes home at Bermuda Hundred and the Forest. Her children’s experiences had been the same. They probably did not know it, but they were now beginning a way of life that would feature constant physical upheaval and change—living and working in what was to become a perpetual construction site. While this may have been exciting to Jefferson, who as the owner and conceiver of the projects would have had a strong incentive to put up with any of the adverse consequences of his choices, those who had to live and work amid the chaos may have felt differently.

Elizabeth Hemings was no stranger to Jefferson’s personality and quirks, and one yearns to know what she thought of this bookish and eccentric young man with the gadgets in his pockets and a tendency to sing as he went about his business. Even before Wayles died and Jefferson came into formal ownership of her family, there were signs that her children’s destinies would be shaped by his demands and desires. We can trace the beginnings of this process in Jefferson’s memorandum books in the early 1770s. In those years Hemings’s eldest son, Martin, then a teenager, appears several times receiving gratuities and payments for catching and selling to Jefferson his beloved mockingbirds.
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From those early days Hemings’s sons began to learn to do things Jefferson wanted to have done. Once he took ownership of them, the process of shaping all the Hemingses to suit his aims only intensified.

Almost as soon as he became their owner, Jefferson singled out the older generation of Hemings males—Martin, Robert, and, as he matured, James—for special treatment. Each man had some degree of freedom within his enslaved status. All were allowed to travel around by themselves, to learn trades, to hire themselves out to employers of their own choice, and to keep all their wages. Despite their status on the law books, Jefferson treated them, to a degree, as if they were lower-class white males. That Robert and James Hemings were his new wife’s half brothers was reason enough to make him see them as different from other slaves. They would have been his in-laws, had slaves been “in law.”

Not all slave owners who shared family ties with enslaved people responded this way, but it should not come as a surprise that some of them might have felt sentimental about blood relationships. Blood mattered a great deal in Virginia society. Race and caste complicated this further, but there are enough instances of fathers who emancipated their children to show that race and status did not always obliterate attentions to family connections. Although Martin Hemings, Elizabeth’s eldest son, had no blood tie to Martha Jefferson, Jefferson’s response to him evidently derived from the fact that he shared a mother with the Hemings-Wayles children. As things turned out, Jefferson freed two of these men—Robert and James—the only slaves he legally emancipated during his lifetime. They, along with Jefferson’s children Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings, were set free as young people when they had their lives ahead of them. The other slaves Jefferson emancipated, all Hemingses—John Hemings, Joseph Fossett, and Burwell Colbert—were, by the standards of the time, old men who had given their lives to Jefferson; they were the “trusted,” “worthy” slaves, freed on the basis of “merit.” Put another way, Robert, James, Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings gained freedom because of who they were—Wayles’s sons, Martha’s brothers, and Jefferson’s children, respectively—while the other men were freed because of what they had done.

In keeping with gender roles of the day, Elizabeth Hemings’s sons had more opportunities than their sisters to broaden their lives by going outside of the home. Enslaved males were generally employed at a much greater variety of jobs than female slaves. If they were not agricultural workers, they were carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, or barbers, engaged in the types of jobs deemed unsuitable for women. Sex segregation became even more pronounced when Virginia’s economy diversified after the Revolutionary War. The shift from tobacco to wheat as a cash crop opened up a host of subsidiary jobs for slaves to fill. More and more enslaved men were taken out of the fields to perform tasks associated with the processing of this new crop, working in mills and granaries, turning wheat into flour. As men were shifted into these and other types of jobs—working in mines, iron works, and other industries—fieldwork became even more the province of women and children.
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The Hemings men were not agricultural workers. They spent their time in the house or traveling with and attending to Jefferson, and were transformed by the kind of work they did and experiences they had, whether it was being trained to become a barber or chef, traveling alone to places near and far from their home, or living by themselves in various Virginia towns.

The Hemings women were not eligible for the transformative experiences that shaped the lives of their male relatives, but they were not treated like other enslaved women at Monticello. Although they, like the male Hemingses, were attached by blood and affinity to Jefferson’s wife, he viewed them differently because they were females. His response to Elizabeth Hemings and her daughters over the years was a gender-appropriate—that is, by eighteenth-century standards—mirror image of his response to the male Hemingses. He constructed the Hemings women along more traditional European feminine lines. The women were exempted from work in the fields, even when everyone else had to go there at harvest time; they instead performed chores not unlike those that many white women were doing—sewing, mending clothes, looking after children, and baking cakes.
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