The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (20 page)

Taking care of a seriously ill and bedridden person is an emotionally and physically difficult task. On the emotional side, the nurse must remain steady while attending to the needs of a perhaps melancholy, depressed individual who may lash out from frustration at the circumstances. If the sick person is a relative or friend, the caretaker feels frightened at the prospect of losing a loved one. Jefferson, Martha’s white sisters, and her sisters-in-law no doubt experienced these aspects of caretaking to the fullest degree. They worked, and they surely grieved. But it is unlikely that they were primarily responsible for carrying out the more physical aspects of tending to the sick. The bedding had to be changed, the patient bathed, or at least wiped clean, and the remnants of sickness, from whatever source, had to be washed away. It is hard to believe that Jefferson and the white women in his household were doing all these unpleasant tasks for five months while Elizabeth Hemings and her daughters simply stood by and watched from afar, with nothing else to do. Socializing had ceased, and there was no steady stream of visitors that had to be attended to. Those days focused everyone’s attention on the bedridden young woman fighting a valiant but losing battle for her life.

One Jefferson biographer, probably taking a cue from Martha Randolph’s recollections, described the Hemings women as being “allowed to file in” on the day of Martha’s death—implying that these women had been deliberately kept from her sick room during the entire period of her sickness, while Jefferson and the female members of his family did all the nursing.
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This construction of events becomes even more problematic when one considers that none of this would have been new to Elizabeth Hemings. She had been looking after Martha in one way or another from the time she was a small girl, no doubt acting as something of a surrogate mother after Martha’s mother and then her two stepmothers died by the time Martha was twelve. Elizabeth Hemings was the one adult female fixture in Martha Jefferson’s life from the day she was born until the day she died. Even after Martha’s death, the connection continued, as Hemings’s daughter Sally was sent along with Martha’s two youngest daughters to live with Martha and Sally’s sister Elizabeth Eppes, while Jefferson took charge of his eldest daughter.

Contemplating Martha Jefferson’s ordeal with childbearing, the historian Jack McLaughlin wrote that “it is a tribute to her strength of will and dedication to what she perceived as her mission in life” that she persevered in the face of all her difficulties.
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That may be true, but it also must be seen as a tribute to the enslaved women—Elizabeth Hemings, her daughters, and Ursula—whose labor sustained Martha through all her trials and allowed her to make a home for her family. Without that support she would not have made it as far as she did. These women were there at the end of Martha Jefferson’s life, precisely because they had been there all along.

It has been the lot of women throughout the ages to bear children with heads too large for the birth canals of human beings, whose ancestors inexplicably began to walk upright, changing the shape of their pelvises and making childbirth a more deadly proposition for humans than for any other species. Women have suffered pregnancy-induced high blood pressure and diabetes, postpartum depression and infections that sapped their strength and took their lives. The vast majority of them endured these problems while looking after other children, tending houses, and crops and performing whatever other tasks required of them as wives—and while being slaves. Tragic as her story was, at least Martha Jefferson had the advantages of a household of women—her white sisters and in-laws, her enslaved half sisters, and other enslaved women.

The deathbed scene that the Hemings women described to people at Monticello is both poignant and intriguing in light of what was to come in the lives of some of the people in the room. Just as the Jefferson family tradition memorialized the events surrounding Martha’s death, the Hemingses also passed down stories about that day and relayed their memories to others. According to family tradition, during her final hours Martha Jefferson gave her youngest half sister, Sally Hemings, then nine years old, a handbell as a memento. The young girl, perhaps called by that very bell, had run errands for her older sister.
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The story of this rather ambiguous keepsake highlights with great clarity the strangeness of this world. One sister makes a gesture to another sister that reinforces their family connection, even as it reminds us that one sister was the slave of the other. It is also possible that the story held a different meaning for the Hemingses. Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann Wright’s studies of the oral histories of Monticello’s enslaved families note how stories passed down contain information that can be literal and/or symbolic—the story becomes a mechanism for conveying some important truth that the family wants known about itself beyond just the bare assertion of a discrete fact.
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On the surface the story of the handbell is about Martha giving over something concrete to her sister Sally, singling her out above all the other Hemings sisters in the room that day as someone to whom she had a special link, even though Martha had known Sally, the youngest of the female slaves in the room, the shortest time. Sally Hemings grew up to have something far more important that had once belonged to Martha: her stricken husband, with whom she shared the deathbed watch that day, a moment that undoubtedly helped permanently define her view of him. Sally, in time, would have children by him and live with him for the rest of his life on the mountain, where he had dreamed of living with her sister.

Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello, recounted a more extensive version of the Hemingses’ memories of Martha Jefferson’s death, focusing largely on Martha and Thomas. Bacon arrived long after the event, but knew the Hemings women very well. He remembered their saying that when Mrs. Jefferson lay dying, Elizabeth Hemings, her daughters Betty, Nancy, Critta, and Sally, along with Ursula “stood around the bed.” Her distraught husband, who had scarcely left her side for months on end, “sat by her” while she told him “about a good many things that she wanted done,” for it was apparently clear to all involved that she would not recover.

The story of Jefferson’s promise clearly impressed Bacon, who went on to note that Jefferson was “quite a young man and very handsome,” and Bacon “supposed he could have married well; but he always kept that promise.”
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Years after Bacon’s account, Israel Gillette, another enslaved man from Monticello, said that the older servants there, people of the generation of Elizabeth Hemings’s daughters, referred to the promise—a thing that no doubt shaped the everyday understanding about an unusual aspect of life at Monticello: Jefferson had no wife, so the place had no formal “Mistress.”
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Men lost wives and remarried fairly quickly. John Wayles responded more typically to the deaths of his wives—he got married again. That Jefferson at age thirty-nine promised not to do so was extraordinary.

It was also an extraordinary request. Why would Martha Jefferson ask such a thing of her husband? The historian Fawn Brodie suggested that Martha “may have been as possessive of him in death as she seems to have been possessive of him in life, as jealous of any future wife as she had been jealous of his ‘passion’ for politics,” or “she was simply revealing her terrible sadness in relinquishing him altogether with life.”
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On the other hand, the story suggests that Martha herself stated rather plainly the root of her concerns about Jefferson’s remarrying. Her reported words do not appear to have been motivated by a desire to die knowing that her husband would in some perverse way always belong just to her. This was not about him. It was about her children. She was concerned about the prospect of her daughters’ growing up under the control of a woman who was not their mother.

We should consider Martha’s reported request against the backdrop of her childhood. She had never known her own mother, who died when she was just two years old. There followed a number of years with her first stepmother, who gave birth to Martha’s sisters. After her death, there came a second stepmother, who lived for only one year of her marriage to John Wayles, dying when Martha was twelve. Her sisters were surely close to her and played very important parts in her life. They helped care for her, and one, Elizabeth Eppes, loved and looked after Martha’s motherless children as if they were her own. Without any Wayles family letters or reminiscences to speak of, we have no idea what Martha’s relationships with her two stepmothers were like. We can perhaps infer at the very least that if her experiences with her stepmothers had been good, she would not have been so keen to make sure her own children did not have one. In fact, a positive experience with a stepmother might have encouraged Martha to
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that her husband find a good woman to help him raise her daughters. Instead, she apparently felt it better that he raise the girls alone, or with the help of the numerous women in both their families, whom she must have thought she could count on. On that last point, she was right.

Jefferson was inconsolable. His widowed sister, Martha Carr, who sometimes lived at Monticello with her sons, had to help him from the room before Martha died. They took him to a room, where he was said to have actually passed out for a time.
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Although his wife’s death could not have been unexpected, Jefferson was not prepared for the finality of their separation. She had struggled in some manner with each pregnancy, and he no doubt harbored the hope—even this last time—that she would rally once again. When this did not happen, he gave himself over to a grief that was so enormous that it frightened those around him. He stayed in his room for weeks, walking “incessantly night and day only lying down occasionally when nature was completely exhausted.” He emerged from this self-imposed exile, taking out into the open air the solace that repetitive motion seems to have brought him. Where once he had walked in his room “incessantly,” he now rode his horse with the same intensity, often in the company of his oldest daughter.
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Guilt almost certainly played a role in Jefferson’s extreme reaction to his wife’s death. It was quite clear, well before his time, that some women were simply not equipped to bear children safely. Doctors warned couples about this, after a wife had repeated near-death experiences in childbirth. Even if he never received a specific warning, Jefferson was as intelligent and well versed in medical knowledge as most doctors of that era. He knew that he was, in part, responsible for what had happened to Martha. In writing about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, the historian Andrew Burstein has argued that Jefferson believed that sex was a necessary component to maintaining a healthy life, a not uncommon view then and now.
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The true intensity of Jefferson’s sexual nature, and his implacable belief in his right to have a rich sexual life is displayed most clearly, however, not in his relationship with Sally Hemings but in the way he conducted his sexual life with his wife. Martha Jefferson’s fragile health made the stakes extremely high for the couple. His relationship with Sally Hemings always threatened embarrassment to his family, but his sex life with his wife was a matter of life and death—for her.

The terrible predicament the Jeffersons, and other couples, faced—marriage with no birth control—pitted Jefferson’s own sexual desires against Martha Jefferson’s health, and Martha lost. Jefferson, it must be said, acted in accordance with the mores and expectations of the time.
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Martha Jefferson probably did as well, for she and Thomas were raised in a society where husbands were expected to have unfettered access to their wives’ bodies, and girls were raised to submit. This is not at all to suggest that Martha did not benefit in her sexual life with her husband, that she was not a sexual being herself. The reality was, however, that she and other women had to think about sex in a different way than their husbands. As an elderly man, Jefferson remembered his marriage as “ten years of unchequered happiness.”
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But he had survived his marriage, and we cannot simply assume that Martha Jefferson, who did not survive, felt the same about it—that she was unequivocally happy to have to endure nine months of pregnancy, six times within ten years, and to be brought to death’s door nearly every time. For practically her entire marriage she was either pregnant or lactating. Her body was not her own. Women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even, as we will see, Jefferson’s daughter Martha, expressed exasperation with constant childbearing. In fact, women have rather dramatically shown the world, and everyone inclined to romanticize perpetual pregnancy, how they really feel about the matter. In every society where they have had the choice, they have dropped the birthrate down to at or below the replacement level. After all her struggles with childbearing, Martha Jefferson died at age thirty-four, when she did not have to. Jefferson understood this, and it fueled his agony.

Martha’s brothers Robert and James Hemings, while acting as personal valets, carriage drivers, and traveling companions to Jefferson, had shared experiences with him all around Virginia and other states, setting the stage for their eventual freedom from slavery. Despite their differences in status, they had gotten to know each other’s basic personalities very well and knew things about each other that others in their lives would never have had the occasion to know. But during the ordeal at Monticello in the fall of 1782, it was the women in the Hemings family who witnessed and participated in a transformative family drama, sharing with Jefferson some of the most intimate details and probably the hardest moment of his life—the excruciating end to his marriage brought by his wife’s death. Just as Elizabeth Hemings and her daughters had seen Martha in her weakest and most vulnerable moments, they had seen her husband at his lowest point as well, and they shared memories of this defining time at Monticello.