The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (18 page)

As for John Hemings, less can be made of his decision not to use his father’s last name. It could have been the result of hostility toward Joseph Neilson because of the way he had treated Elizabeth Hemings, or maybe it simply did not matter enough to him. As a second-generation Hemings, he could well have felt the meaning of the name more strongly than members of the younger generation. His nephews Joseph Fossett and Burwell Colbert were one more step removed from Elizabeth Hemings and were willing to forge a different identity for themselves and their families.

While Elizabeth Hemings’s two oldest sons began their lives in service primarily to Jefferson, she and her daughters were tied to the home, needs, and demands of his wife, Martha. As the daughter of a much married Virginia planter, and a woman who had been married before, Martha Jefferson was well acquainted with what was expected of her as a planter’s wife. We have no records of her life at the Forest, so we do not know with any certainty just how she grew up. Her short first marriage produced no record of her life that has been preserved either. Martha Jefferson has benefited from the tendency to fill in the empty spaces in the lives of whites in the planter class with the most positive speculations that can be ventured. Usually, in the absence of information about blacks, the spaces are filled in with the most negative speculations about their capabilities and personae. Her great-granddaughter described Martha Jefferson as having been “well educated for her day,”
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which still leaves us somewhat in the dark about her. The norm for young women in Martha’s day seems to have been to educate females to read, play music, be pleasant companions to their husbands, and attend to the efficient running of the house. By the accounts of some contemporaries, Martha was said to have excelled in all these functions, although we have only one short, somewhat formulaic letter, to judge her literary capabilities.
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Her mother, Martha Eppes, was from a prominent family, but we are still left to ponder what, if any, influence her father’s origins had on her conception of herself and her capacities.

Historians have long speculated about a possible inner tension in Jefferson because his father’s and mother’s families were not evenly matched in terms of social prominence. Much has been made of his mildly sarcastic comment in his unfinished autobiography about his maternal relatives’ ability to trace their origins “far back in England and Scotland,” saying that everyone could make of that what he wanted—implying that there was really nothing worthwhile to be made of it. Jefferson’s words have been interpreted as a defensive gesture in favor of his father, the self-made man who married into a large and well-connected family.
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They may also betray a recognition of the fact that his much loved wife was the daughter of a person who had started life at an even much lower level than his own father. His children with Martha were just one generation away from a former servant.

Jefferson listed in a family Bible the vital statistics of the closest members of his family. Indeed, that is how we know the place and year of John Wayles’s birth. Other than those stark listings, there was no tracing of John Wayles’s family back in England, not even to record his mother’s or father’s names. One would not have expected Jefferson to have reproduced a detailed genealogy of the Wayles family. But the failure even to mention for future generations the names of his father-in-law’s parents, which he certainly knew, is curious. As far as Jefferson was concerned, Wayles’s life mattered only in terms of what he accomplished after he came to Virginia.

Jefferson knew that both Peter Jefferson and John Wayles had raised themselves through their talent, hard work, and good luck. Their examples fit perfectly with his idea about what could be achieved in an America that was open to the advancement of common people, that is to say, common white male people. If Jefferson had any degree of self-consciousness about his father’s position relative to his mother’s, think of what Martha, “the daughter of a servant boy,” might have felt in a society concerned with rank and family position. Both she and Jefferson, no doubt, had seen the parodies and insults leveled at her father in the pages of the
Virginia Gazette
a mere two years before their courtship. Members of Virginia society knew who her father was before he became prosperous. It is unlikely that so socially conscious a group of people would ever have forgotten where he had come from, or ever let her forget.

Martha barely had time to become a wife to Jefferson before she became a mother. In September of 1772, exactly nine months after her marriage, she gave birth to the couple’s first daughter, whom they named Martha. Over the course of the next ten years, Martha Jefferson would conceive five more times, and her physical condition grew more precarious with each pregnancy and birth. The first birth was something of a portent as Martha had difficulty nursing her newborn daughter. As they did for so much in their lives, the Jeffersons turned to a slave for help. Ursula Granger had given birth to her son Archy around the same time, so the Jefferson’s baby daughter was given over to her to nurse along with her own newborn son. Martha thrived, but Archy lived only one year.
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When upper-class plantation wives like Martha Jefferson spoke of keeping house—making soap, brewing beer, and the like—what they were really saying is that they supervised the slave women who actually performed the physical labor these tasks entailed. It is a safe bet that Martha Jefferson did not stir boiling pots of lye to make soap, or empty hops into containers to make beer. She may have tried her hand at a few domestic tasks as a lark, but certainly one of the points of having slaves was to relieve oneself of the drudgery of actually having to make a cake or cook the family meal under conditions far removed from modern standards. Cooking in the eighteenth century was a hazardous operation, involving much heavy lifting and open-fire ovens. This arduous task would not have been Martha Jefferson’s responsibility, although her household accounts during her marriage record how much soap she made, how much beer she brewed.
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Isaac Jefferson remembered her standing with a cookbook reading instructions to his mother, who actually baked the cakes.
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It is also likely that Martha stood giving instructions to the Hemings women, some her half sisters, who performed the tasks that helped her provide a comfortable existence for her husband and children.

T
HE
A
MERICAN
R
EVOLUTION
came most meaningfully into the lives of the Hemings family in 1779. By that time the armed conflict had been going on for four years, and the family’s only connection to the escalating crisis was Robert’s time with Jefferson in Philadelphia when he was a delegate from Virginia to the Second Continental Congress. The whole family, however, was involved by proxy because its owner had entered the revolutionary fray with the publication in 1773 of his essay
A Summary View of the Rights of British North America
.
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To the extent that his life and fortune were in jeopardy, the lives of his slaves were precarious as well. The
Summary View
was Jefferson’s very public debut as a full-fledged opponent of British colonial policy. The document impressed readers in the northern and southern colonies and, in part, led to the invitation in 1776 for Jefferson to draft the American Declaration of Independence, which would ensure his fame throughout the ages.
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Jefferson’s memorandum book entries for the days immediately before and after he wrote the declaration give no hint of the important step the colonists were about to take and, then, had taken. There are, instead, various quotidian notations, including references to purchases for “Bob” (Robert Hemings), his fourteen-year-old manservant.
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There was no occasion for Hemings to take part in the drama in Philadelphia in any serious way, although everyone in the vicinity knew they were living in momentous times. It was, however, during Jefferson’s term as the Revolutionary War governor of Virginia, from 1779 to 1781, that members of the Hemings family became intimately involved with the outcome of the Revolution.

Jefferson had not actively sought the position of governor. He had, in fact, thought about retiring from public life altogether, a step that would have kept him and members of the Hemings family at Monticello. As early as 1776, after serving in the Continental Congress, he had declined a commission to go to Paris, along with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, stunning several of his colleagues into issuing stinging rebukes in letters that hinted that Jefferson was acting selfishly when selflessness was the order of the day.
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None of them realized, because he never said it, that Jefferson’s ambivalence about remaining a public man centered very much on his concerns about his wife’s health. After the birth of her first child, Martha, she had given birth to a daughter and a son. The boy died in infancy. Her health was at risk both times.

Although Jefferson was not enthusiastic about it, the governorship, to which he was elected in June of 1779, at least allowed him to remain in Virginia. Having been nominated for the position and won a narrow victory over two of his closest friends, John Page and Thomas Nelson, Jefferson evidently felt he could not refuse the honor. He came into an office for which he might have been well qualified in times of peace, but for which he was ill suited in a time of war. He seemed to know this from the very start, expressing a degree of pessimism at the outset of his term that foreshadowed the difficulties, most not of his own making, that would later engulf him. “The appointment,” Jefferson wrote, “would not likely…add to my happiness.” In fact, it did not. On one occasion he pronounced himself “mortified” whenever people expected things of him that he could not deliver, such as turning an often reluctant group of Virginia militiamen into an effective fighting force against the British.
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His wife could not at first be persuaded to join him in Williamsburg,
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and Martin Hemings was given money to take care of the household expenses. Although not specifically mentioned in any of his documents, it is likely, given the roles they played in his life, that Robert or James Hemings also had responsibilities. By September, Martha Jefferson, who had been staying at the Forest with her sister, had decided that she would come to Williamsburg with the two Jefferson daughters, Martha and Mary, called Patsy and Polly. The gathering of the whole Jefferson family in the capital thus meant bringing along a larger contingent of Hemingses to carry out the requisite duties of daily life in the household.

Seventeen-year-old Robert Hemings drove the phaeton that brought Jefferson and the family to the capital in Williamsburg in 1779. His brothers Martin and James rode alongside on horseback. All three men were there to perform the same services they performed at Monticello—Martin, to be the butler for the governor’s household, and Robert and James to be Jefferson’s personal servants. Their half sisters Mary Hemings and Betty Brown were brought along as well. Mary was twenty-six and by then the mother of Elizabeth Hemings’s first two grandchildren, Daniel Farley, who was seven, and Molly, who was two. The Hemingses were joined by at least six other slaves: Jupiter and his wife, Suckey, the cook John, and George and Ursula Granger and their son Isaac, who went by the name Jefferson. Isaac’s recollections along with other Jeffersonian documents form the basis of our knowledge about the origins and activities of some members of the Hemings family. He was seven years old at the time, and his memories were probably reinforced by many family retellings of this momentous event in their lives. He recalled that his family, the Hemings brothers, their sisters, a niece, and a nephew, along with the other slaves, lived in a section of the House of the Assembly.
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The Jeffersons, and the Hemingses who accompanied them, were not in Williamsburg for long. Concerned about the rapid advance of British troops, the Virginia General Assembly and Jefferson decided it would be prudent to move the capital farther inland, to Richmond, for the duration of the conflict. Jefferson, with his wife and daughters, Patsy and Polly, in tow, packed up his household and moved to what was then thought to be the temporary capital, where they set up household in a home owned by one of his relatives.

As to the enslaved members of the Jefferson household, one gets a sense from Isaac Jefferson’s recollections that being away from their normal home in the midst of all the turmoil was something of an adventure, which expanded their horizons beyond what they, particularly the women, would have encountered had they been living exclusively at Monticello. There was the spectacle of war itself, a frightening yet energizing force, the troops in uniform, the urgent meetings of the governor and his advisers, a heightened sense of danger, and the prospect that however the conflict turned out, a way of life might be altered forever.

And then there were new faces. Two men in particular stood out in Isaac’s memories: a white man named Bob Anderson and a black man named Mat Anderson. Isaac’s description of the two men does not make clear the nature of their relationship beyond the fact that they worked together. Both men were part of the regiment that came to the governor’s residence several times a week to “salute the Governor.” Bob played the fife and Mat the drum. They were, apparently, quite a sight—“marching about there drumming and fifing.” Although Isaac does not mention it, both Andersons may well have been in some type of uniform if traditional military protocol was followed. At least one member of the Hemings family was duly impressed, and her feelings were reciprocated.

During the course of their visits, the black Anderson, Mat—in Isaac’s phrase—“was sort-a making love to Mary Hemings.” While his white counterpart, Bob, went into the governor’s residence for drinks, Mat Anderson kept company with Mary Hemings in the kitchen. We can probably never know whether Anderson’s courtship of Hemings was more than platonic. “Sort-a making love to”
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could be a euphemism for flirting with, attempting to court, or something more serious. We also do not know the precise months that Isaac was speaking of when he described the Jefferson household’s interactions with both Andersons.

As all of these personal matters unfolded, a larger drama was, of course, being played out in the enslaved community of which Isaac makes no mention. There is no word about what, if anything, Lord Dunmore’s proclamation offering freedom to any of the slaves of rebellious colonials who joined the British cause meant to the black people who attended the Jefferson family.
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They certainly were aware of it as news traveled fast throughout enslaved communities, and whole families prepared themselves to link up with the British forces on the march. Hundreds of slaves, in fact, joined Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, and there would have been more had they not been felled by smallpox and other camp-related diseases.

Isaac Jefferson, still a child, perhaps had no personal thoughts about the matter. Yet his recollections reveal that he was surely paying attention to life among the adults at both Williamsburg and Richmond. Did they have anything to say that he remembered, or was he being discreet in front of Charles Campbell, the white Virginian newspaperman to whom he gave his recollections in 1847? At that point in history, with the South and North in the throes of a deepening sectional crisis, Isaac may have thought it unwise to suggest, or Campbell may have thought it unwise to repeat, that any among Thomas Jefferson’s slaves had been anything other than completely loyal to him. In the coming battle between North and South, Unionists and Confederates alike would use Jefferson as a symbol for their respective causes. That process had already started when Isaac Jefferson talked to Campbell. The truth is that some of Jefferson’s slaves—at least twenty-three men, women, and children—had a different conception of loyalty and did run away from him. Jefferson noted their departure in his Farm Book. These slaves, he wrote without any apparent trace of irony, ran away and “joined the enemy.”
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What led some slaves to decide to take advantage of Dunmore’s promise, while others did not? Individual personality surely counted: the runaways would have had to have considerable faith in their abilities to evade capture, along with a certain level of trust that the British would honor their word, or that whatever fate awaited them was better than life as a slave in Virginia. The ones who stayed may have been uncertain about their chances for escape or thought that the devil they knew was better than the devil they did not know. And some, like the Hemingses and other slaves living with Jefferson in Richmond, may have had reason to believe that their current positions were about the best that they could hope for in life at that moment. The slaves who ran away from Jefferson were from his outlying plantations and did not have the kind of relationship with him and his family that could have made them cling to any hope of freedom in the future or moderate treatment under slavery, not that freedom necessarily constituted a realistic hope for
any
of Jefferson’s slaves at that point. Of the Hemingses, Martin, Robert, and James were the only ones who had virtually free movement. They could have run to the British had they wanted to. Perhaps they believed that any opportunity for unfettered emancipation in the future would be jeopardized by running away at that time, or perhaps they never seriously considered it.

War being the live chess match that it is, capturing the “king” (Governor Jefferson) was a principal object for British troops. Hence, it was no surprise when they came for him in Richmond in January of 1781. Under the command of Benedict Arnold, who had gone over to the Loyalists the year before, the British had executed a daring attack on Virginia by way of the James River as part of a campaign to establish a presence at Portsmouth and cut off supplies to the Continental army. With Arnold proceeding up the James River, Jefferson directed Robert and James Hemings to take Martha Jefferson and their daughters to Tuckahoe, the plantation of his mother’s kinsman and his father’s friend, Thomas Mann Randolph.
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Jefferson had spent part of his boyhood there and in the years to come would be reunited with the place when his daughter Martha married Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.

Arnold’s forces met only token resistance when they reached Richmond. Apparently Jefferson did not know the number of troops that were advancing toward the capital and delayed calling out the militia from Petersburg, Richmond, Albemarle County, and the Shenandoah Valley. Even had he acted more quickly, there was little chance the capital could have been defended against the British forces. During these days fraught with tension, the people of Richmond, black and white, waited anxiously. And then soldiers arrived. Isaac Jefferson remembered the confusion about whether the advancing troops were hostile or friendly. Some people, taking them to be militiamen “from Petersburg” who had come to “join them,” started out to greet them. The British cleared up the confusion by firing cannons, which touched off a chaotic scramble among the women and children at Jefferson’s home and, no doubt, throughout the town. Isaac was playing in the yard when his mother ran out from the kitchen to take him to safety. Mary Hemings gathered up her daughter, Molly. As soon as the fighting started, Thomas Jefferson rode off into the mountains on horseback to evade capture. He spent the night at Tuckahoe and then sent his family, most probably along with Robert and James Hemings, off to Fine Creek, a farm inherited from his father that was deeper into the Virginia countryside.
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With Robert and James gone, the other Hemingses remained in Richmond along with the rest of the household staff. The British came to the governor’s residence looking for Jefferson, telling the slaves who remained there that they “didn’t want to hurt him; only wanted to put a pair of silver handcuffs on him” and that they “had brought them along with them on purpose.” They apparently did no physical damage to the governor’s residence, but used his corn to feed their horses, made liberal use of Jefferson’s always well-stocked wine cellar, and filled each soldier’s “knap-sack” with meat taken from the “meat-house.”
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