The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (19 page)

Unable to take Jefferson into custody, the British did take along some of the enslaved people from the governor’s residence, including Mary Hemings and her children, as well as George and Ursula and their son Isaac. The adults were forced to walk—the children were allowed to ride—as the British continued their advance through the Virginia countryside, taking slaves (or being voluntarily joined by them) from plantations as they moved toward Yorktown. It is not clear how long the Hemingses and other slaves taken from Jefferson’s plantations remained with British forces. But they and many others endured the harshness of life in the encampments, where rampant smallpox and camp fever led to many slaves’ deaths. Jefferson returned to Richmond shortly after the British quit the town and resumed something of a life there. In the middle of all this tumult, Jefferson noted that he had paid a “Midwife for Bet.” The Hemings family added a new member when Betty Brown gave birth to her son Wormley Hughes, in March of 1781.
¹⁴

Martin Hemings and other members of the Hemings family had apparently traveled to Fine Creek to join the rest of the Jeffersons, for references to them show up in his account book entries during weeks following the siege at Richmond.
¹⁵
Over the next weeks Jefferson went back and forth between Fine Creek, Westham, Manchester, and other towns, carrying on official business, most likely with Robert and James Hemings. A combination of bad luck—the French troops that were expected to arrive and supplement the paltry Virginia militia were engaged in a battle and came too late to stop Arnold—and poor military strategizing on Jefferson’s part—he failed to see the urgency of the situation and therefore could not alert General Washington in a timely fashion to dispatch some of his own forces to help—left Governor Jefferson vulnerable to charges that he had failed to protect the people of Virginia.
¹⁶

Jefferson’s reputation as war governor sustained a further blow after Virginia’s government moved to Charlottesville to avoid another confrontation at Richmond. Now, back on his home turf at Monticello with his family, he dealt with the war and his own personal tragedies. His baby daughter, Lucy Elizabeth, had died in mid-April, a death that hurt her father so deeply that he once again contemplated leaving public life to attend to his family.
¹⁷
His term as governor was supposed to end on June 2, and he eagerly looked forward to that day, although there is some indication that other members of the government were unwilling to let him go. The death of children in those days was tragic, but not unexpected. Even if Jefferson had spoken freely about his family difficulties and how they were affecting him, he would not have received the sympathy that a grieving parent would receive today. In fact, he was roundly criticized whenever he suggested that his family duties took precedence over his life as a public man; correspondents hinted that it was the simple “pleasures” of family life that called him. It was actually more often life’s fears that gripped Jefferson; the thought that his wife might die in his absence kept him tethered to the mountain.

Although he was at his core a man of the eighteenth century, much about Jefferson’s attitude toward his wife and family would be familiar to twenty-first-century observers, especially his belief that he should not readily sacrifice family life for his public career and his direct involvement in the care of his ill wife and children. Hard as it was for him, Lucy Jefferson’s death, quite understandably, hit Martha Jefferson especially hard. Her fragile health could only have added to the anxiety that was now a part of Jefferson’s existence on public and private fronts alike.

There was simply no respite from the tensions and instabilities of war. Around the time Jefferson was slated, at least in his own mind, to leave office, Lord Cornwallis, recently arrived in Virginia, ordered Banastre Tarleton to go to Charlottesville to take into custody Jefferson and any other government officials he could find. Once again Jefferson sent Martha and his daughters away, probably with Robert and James Hemings. Jefferson’s term as governor ended on a Saturday, but the assembly postponed the decision to elect a new governor until the following Monday. That decision left Jefferson in office for the coup de grâce: being forced to flee his own home at the approach of Tarleton’s advancing troops. With enemy troops on the march, Jefferson had stayed at Monticello, following their movements through a telescope. At the very last moment, when they reached the base of Monticello and started up, Jefferson escaped, as he had done six months before, on horseback, toward Carter’s Mountain, leaving Martin Hemings in charge of the household. Although Tarleton’s approach scattered many other government officials, Jefferson, as the governor, symbolically embodied Virginia, and he became the special target of opprobrium that lasted for decades. It is hard to know what Jefferson’s critics at the time and later expected him to have done in that situation—engage Tarleton’s troops in a single-handed, meaningless fight to the death (probably just his own) or allow himself (the governor) to be captured and held for ransom? Flight was the only prudent decision.

This event made enough of an impression upon the Hemingses and the Jeffersons that the story about what happened on those days passed down through both family lines. Jeffersons and Hemingses told a version of the “slave/servant hides the silver from the marauding invaders” story so common in Revolutionary War as well as Civil War memories. In this instance, Martin Hemings took it upon himself to hide the Jefferson family silver under the planks covering the floor of one of Monticello’s front porticos. Just as he finished his task, the British appeared on Monticello’s lawn. Hemings “slammed down the planks,” leaving an enslaved man named Caesar under the floorboard.

The British tried to get Martin Hemings to tell where Jefferson had gone, threatening to shoot him if he did not answer. He was said to have remained defiant. To Thomas Jefferson’s white family, who saw slaves as mere instruments and extensions of their master’s will and interests, Hemings’s actions appeared as a selfless and comforting display of a slave’s intense loyalty to his master. The early Jefferson biographer Henry Randall, who wrote the Jefferson family tradition into history books, was also remarkably willing to give Hemings attributes of aggressive manhood in this situation. “‘Fire away, then,’ retorted the black, fiercely answering glance for glance, and not receding a hair’s breadth from the muzzle of the cocked pistol.”
¹⁸
In Randall’s depiction, the depth of Hemings’s devotion to Jefferson sparked his defiant response, which would have been inappropriate for any other reason. Former slaves at Monticello and their descendants also kept the story of what happened that day on the mountain, although it is very likely that their stories of defiance had a different end in mind: to highlight a moment when enslaved people took the initiative in a dangerous and unpredictable situation.
¹⁹

Whatever hopes contemporaries or latter-day observers grafted onto Hemings’s actions, the record that we have of his personality suggests that he tended at all times to be a very contentious man. If he did risk death rather than respond to threats, there is a good chance that it was his own natural aggression and flintiness, infused with adrenaline, and not mere sentimentality that fueled his stubborn resistance in the face of British demands. His actions were in keeping with a character that apparently existed well before the crisis with the British at Monticello, perhaps even well before he met Thomas Jefferson. With Jefferson in flight and great uncertainty about what was going to happen, Martin Hemings was as much his own man at that moment as he could ever have been in his life to that date. During Hemings’s confrontation with the British, and for eighteen hours more, while the troops occupied Monticello and then decided that neither the house nor its environs should be disturbed, Caesar remained trapped under the floorboard. The British left the mountain. Jefferson later expressed gratitude for Tarleton’s uncharacteristically benign treatment of his home plantation.
²⁰

Perhaps the unique beauty of the place stayed the hand of the British at Monticello, because they were not so careful at Jefferson’s other plantations. Elk Hill, where Elizabeth Hemings and her younger children had lived for a brief period after John Wayles’s death, became Cornwallis’s headquarters for at time. In contrast to what happened at the governor’s residence and Monticello, he allowed his troops to do substantial physical damage to the place, burning barns and fences and destroying crops in the fields. They did the same at Jefferson’s plantation Willis Creek, just across the James River.
²¹
The bulk of the slaves who ran away from Jefferson’s plantations ran from Elk Hill and Willis Creek; some were whole families. These individuals joined members of the Hemings family at Yorktown, which had turned into a death trap for many slaves so desperate to escape the oppression of slavery that they risked severe hardship in order to gain freedom. In the end, their experiences in the British encampments affected all enslaved people who escaped from Jefferson’s plantations. Fifteen died of either smallpox or other illnesses contracted during their time with the British.
²²
When Jefferson made arrangements to have his human property returned to Elk Hill and Monticello (he even dispatched Martin Hemings to bring a runway slave back from Williamsburg with the aid of George Wythe, the otherwise staunch champion of black emancipation), other slaves died from their contact with the returnees, whom they had attempted to nurse back to health.
²³

By the fall of 1781 all of the Hemingses were back at Monticello with Jefferson, who remained firm in his desire to leave public life. An inquiry into his actions as governor deeply wounded him for the rest of his days. Of all the brickbats hurled at him over the course of a very long and contentious public career, the official probe into his conduct as governor hurt the most. Though he was exonerated in the end, he never forgot that some of his fellow Virginians, most notably Patrick Henry, had encouraged others to undertake the inquiry and had been eager to have him censured. Jefferson closed the door on this low period of his life and joined his family at his retreat at Poplar Forest, a hundred miles from Monticello. There he turned to writing what would become his only published book,
Notes on the State of Virginia
, in which, among many other musings, he disparaged slavery, but offered as “a suspicion only” (one that he seemed more certain about than he was willing to say) that black people were inferior to whites. On one point he did not equivocate: the mixture with whites improved black people. There is little doubt that he had most in mind the young men who traveled with him and ran his household staff and the young women and girls who attended his wife every day—the people who were his wife’s blood family were the mixed-race people he knew the best.

The End of an Era

Within a year after Jefferson’s disastrous turn as governor of Virginia, a profound and catastrophic event at Monticello would change his life and ultimately alter the course of life for Elizabeth Hemings, her children, and grandchildren. Martha Jefferson, who had endured at least six pregnancies while married to Jefferson, and one when she was married to her first husband, gave birth to a daughter in May of 1782. It appears that the difficulties she had throughout the pregnancy did not abate following the birth of her daughter, whom she named Lucy Elizabeth after the Lucy Elizabeth who had died the year before.
²⁴
Martha Jefferson was a small and delicate woman who lacked the robust constitution of her husband. Even with that one wonders exactly why her pregnancies took such a toll. Her family provided no real details about her illnesses, and in truth they may not have known what was going on themselves. This was an era of primitive medical knowledge. Another sixty years would pass before people came to understand the importance of the simple act of washing hands before and after any type of medical procedure, including the delivery of babies. While there is no definitive answer to the question why Martha Jefferson had persistent problems with pregnancy and childbirth, it is certain that bearing children put her life in jeopardy. The fear that she might die must have surfaced with each pregnancy. That was certainly the case in 1782 when Jefferson wrote to James Monroe announcing the birth of his daughter and describing Martha’s condition as dangerous.
²⁵

Many years later, when recalling her mother’s last illness, Martha Jefferson Randolph remembered that in those final months it was her father, her mother’s sisters, and sisters-in-law who nursed and cared for Martha Jefferson.
²⁶
Her memory, however, rendered invisible the enslaved women who had actually performed many of the tasks that helped her mother play the multiple roles of plantation mistress, wife, and mother. This happened even though these women played an even greater role in Martha Jefferson’s day-to-day life precisely because her physical makeup impaired her ability to live up to the demands of those roles. In an era without reliable birth control, and with likely hostility to the concept even if it had been generally available, Martha had been pregnant every other year of her marriage. The events surrounding childbearing were largely the province of women. Although none of the Hemings women were midwives, they were certainly involved in caring for Martha during her confinement, and assisted at her births and during the lying-in times after the births.

While Martha Randolph undoubtedly told the truth from her perspective of her mother’s last days, there are good reasons to believe that she drew an incomplete picture. Her father talked and wrote about the wheat or corn or peach trees he had “planted” when we know that he did not actually plow or sow his fields. When he made his famous trip to upstate New York and New England, ostensibly to study the Hessian fly but really for political reasons, only fleeting references reveal that James Hemings was along with him. So when Martha Jefferson Randolph spoke of her immediate white family as having been the sole actors in the day-to-day drama of her mother’s lingering illness and death, one must keep in mind slave owners’ predisposition to make slaves disappear from the central dramas of their lives—unless talk of their presence served the owners’ need in some fashion.