The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (59 page)

R. T. W. Duke, a white resident of Charlottesville, who knew several of Mary Hemings and Thomas Bell’s grandchildren, described what he called the “‘easy’ morality” of Bell’s and Hemings’s day, not just in terms of what people actually did but in the way others reacted to them. He said that “no one paid attention to a man’s method of living.”
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Their neighbors, Duke explained, would not have thought to raise a public fuss about the pair. His observation fits in with other known information about that era. Eighteenth-century people like Bell, Hemings, Jefferson, and their neighbors fit the popular conception neither of the Puritans nor of the later Victorians, though there is often a tendency to read the perceived values of one society forward and the other backward to cover the people who lived in the interim. There were standards of behavior, as there are in every period, but the era of Bell, Jefferson, and Hemings was practical—more libertarian—about the ways of human beings and sex.

There was premarital sex, among all classes, but with the expectation that the couple would marry and avoid the stigma of illegitimacy. Fornication and interracial marriages were officially against the law, but neighbors were not going to bother people about their relations unless what they were doing somehow directly affected them or represented an aggressive threat to social mores. The couple usually had to act in a fashion that was annoying or troubling in some exceptional way before any persons in the community actively concerned themselves with their behavior.
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Vigilante, and quasi-vigilante, activities are more likely to occur in communities living in fear of losing control in some fashion. There was no question who was in control of society in Albemarle County in the 1790s.

The stricter present-day “morality” of Duke’s age—the one he contrasted with that of Hemings’s and Bell’s day—was the morality of a white South that had declared war on the blacks in their midst after the Confederate’s defeat in the Civil War. Having had one form of control over blacks wrested from them, they desperately sought to reestablish other forms. Virginia fell into the total grip of Jim Crow. Interracial couples had a greater chance of being censured in Duke’s era than in Hemings’s and Bell’s time, and laws regarding racial classifications became even tighter. It was not until the 1920s, however, that Virginia became the first state to adopt as a matter of law the so-called one-drop rule for deciding blackness.
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Twentieth-century Virginia legislators were more stringent in their beliefs about racial categories than Jefferson, who pronounced octoroons (individuals with one-eighth black ancestry) white, even though they, like his youngest son, Eston, could be visibly of African descent.
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Duke’s Charlottesville could not have countenanced a Thomas Bell living openly in town with a black woman and having children with her. He would never have become a justice of the peace or been appointed to a committee to study a proposal to bring public education to the town, as he was back in the 1790s while living with Mary Hemings.
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The Bell-Hemings union reveals something else about the nature of Charlottesville society, the workings of small towns, and family business in their time. We have no official record of Bell’s ever having formally freed Mary Hemings or the children he had with her. Formal freedom required drafting a deed of manumission and filing it in the county courthouse, as Jefferson would do with deeds of manumission for Robert and James Hemings during the time Hemings and Bell were together. Alternatively, slaves could be freed by a will that would then be filed. One might understand how the recordation of one Bell deed might be lost, but that all three would have been lost seems unlikely. There is no gap in the records of Albemarle County deeds for that period. The most probable answer is that Bell freed his enslaved family only informally, and gambled that his will, which treats them as if they were already free, would be respected by his immediate white family and members of the community.

Bell’s failure to act would be completely familiar to property and contract professors, as well as to legions of lawyers. The former have dozens of cases to analyze with their students and the latter are kept employed because of a simple fact: people often fail, in the most critical situations, to follow simple legal formalities even when the failure to do so could work catastrophic results for people they love. People often do things that make no sense. They postpone making wills and die before they get the chance, leaving it to the state to distribute their property and find guardians for their minor children. They purport to transfer land without a written document, a legal impossibility in countries following the English system of jurisprudence since the 1600s.

Bell apparently trusted that his legal relatives, and the surrounding community, who knew very well who Mary Hemings was to him, would not challenge his wishes as expressed in his will. Sure enough, as far as we know, no one rose to stand against his preferences, which is yet another example of how law works “on the ground,” so to speak. When everyone, for whatever reason, agrees to look the other way, individuals can easily circumvent legal rules. Several decades later, Mary’s sister Sally, who was also freed informally, appeared in the 1830 census as a free white person when she was neither legally free nor white. A few years after that, she appeared as a mulatto woman freed in 1826. Even though no formal papers had been filed, the community treated her as a free person. Still, Bell’s was a risky strategy, and one wonders whether he might have been concerned about testing the limits of his community’s tolerance. It was one thing for him to live with Hemings and have children with her when she was his property, but he might have gone too far if he had tried to live openly with her when she was a free woman. Had she been freed, of course, they still would not have been able to marry. Slavery provided a “polite” cover for what would otherwise be illegal fornication.

The coming years brought much travel between Monticello and Bell’s house and store in Charlottesville. Mary Hemings’s home was a meeting place—and no doubt a place of retreat—for multiple generations of Hemingses. According to family tradition, even after Bell died, Jefferson liked to come by the house to listen to Sally Bell’s husband, Jesse Scott, play the violin. Scott was a member of a well-known and much celebrated mixed-race family of musicians. In that very convoluted and insular world, his family’s connection to Jefferson was long-standing by the time of his marriage to Hemings and Bell’s daughter. Jefferson had hired the “Scott Family” to play at his own daughter Martha’s wedding, an event that took place two months after he first met Scott’s future father-in-law that Christmas Day in 1789.
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These multiple overlapping connections—business, personal, and family—ensured that there would be deep connections between the mountain and Main Street. Those bonds began to be forged in earnest during the period when the Hemingses started to reassemble at Monticello.

T
HOUGH ALL THE
Hemingses had stories to tell in the last days of 1789 and the beginning of 1790, James and Sally certainly had more exotic and startling things to reveal to their family about their adventures abroad. One wonders about their states of mind in those early days. Theirs had not been a short vacation to a foreign land, dabbling in the local culture just long enough to get a taste of it before returning home and, at most, having their internal clocks disrupted by living briefly in a different time zone. They were out of their country long enough to have become part of a new one and to be changed in ways subtle and profound.

That certainly happened to Jefferson, who relished his time in the country and brought elements of it home in the form of his dress, furniture, appreciation for haute cuisine, wine, and, some said, even his mannerisms. Playing at being French meant one thing for Jefferson and another for the two Hemingses, James in particular. He had been in France as long as Jefferson and had every reason to remain attached to things French because it was his job to be a French chef. And while Jefferson merely added French culture to an already celebrated and secure persona, Hemings was a much younger man, with fewer social resources at his disposal. Having received a completely new identity in France, he now had a profession and experiences that set him apart from others.

Along with whatever cultural affectations and, perhaps, sense of superiority, attached to brother and sister because of their European adventure, France lived in their memory as their time out of Virginian slavery and the place where they could have lived free. They had to adjust to something very different now, picking up where they had left off as slaves in a slave society. If Jefferson and his daughters were at all discomfited by being thrown back into “the Forest of Albermarle,”
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they had not experienced so vast a change in their statuses. Where they had once been powerful slave-owning white Virginians, they were now powerful slave-owning white Virginians who spoke better French and had firsthand knowledge of French culture.

The physical surroundings at Monticello told a symbolic story of the social distance the siblings had traveled from a place of potential freedom back to a slave society. They had returned from living at a grand and luxurious residence with indoor plumbing to an unkempt and run-down “great” house that must have seemed a near wreck to them after the Hôtel de Langeac. A few months after arriving home, Jefferson warned his in-laws, the Eppeses, whom he had invited for a visit, that were they to come, they would be “roughing it,” indicating the poor condition of even his own living quarters.
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There was no neighborhood full of well-appointed homes, no street scenes to provide daily theater, no more balls for Sally Hemings to attend as lady-in-waiting, no more sumptuous architecture. Instead, the scene the siblings took in upon their arrival included the neglected “great house” looming over tiny slave cabins dotting the landscape, providing a stark reminder of what they had decided to return to.

Those poor dwellings housed the brother’s and sister’s relatives and other enslaved people. It was, most likely, in one of those cabins that Elizabeth Hemings learned that her daughter was now in the same position that she had been in with the master of the household. Sally Hemings could tell her mother why she believed her life and that of her children would be different from the lives her mother and siblings had lived. Did Elizabeth Hemings wish her daughter had made a different choice, to have opted for freedom even if it meant she might be lost to the Virginia Hemingses forever?

Elizabeth and Sally Hemings surely discussed how the laws of slavery in France differed from the laws of Virginia. But that Hobson’s choice for families in slave societies was an especially tough one for females, and Sally Hemings’s predicament and her mother’s more likely reaction to it, is explained very well by the historian Stephanie M. H. Camp’s observations about enslaved women’s attitudes toward flight from slavery. Camp explained, “Paramount among women’s reasons for not running away as fugitives more frequently were their family responsibilities and gender ideals among the enslaved. Women were enmeshed in networks of extended family and friends, and they played central roles in the black family.” Enslaved women defined themselves as women “through their activities on behalf of their families.” The “dense social relations” that informed their lives made it especially hard for them to leave their families behind. Many enslaved women did run away, but the special pressures they faced—the things they had to think about before they made their decisions—were ever present and insistent.
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One can easily see how women whose femininity was devalued by the society at large would want to latch onto a definition of self tied to something positive—being a source of support for loved ones—even if that meant putting self aside, and forgoing a chance for individual freedom. Self-sacrifice was a route to self-affirmation and respectability. Stephanie Camp quotes Molly Hornblow, who criticized her granddaughter for considering running away. “Nobody,” Hornblow said, “respects a mother who forsakes her children.”
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In a culture where daughters were also expected to care for elderly members of their families, it was very likely that the sentiment ran in both directions to at least some degree. A daughter could also not be seen forsaking her mother. Jefferson, with his very traditional views about the role of women in family, probably reminded the sixteen-year-old girl coming into womanhood of her duties to her family as he sought to persuade her to come home with him. We do not know how Elizabeth Hemings felt about the way her daughter dealt with Jefferson and freedom or, for that matter, about how Jefferson had dealt with her daughter. Nor do we know whether she would have better understood it if her son had stayed than if her daughter had, but we do know that she had valuable information about what life was like as a slave woman attached to the master of a plantation. She could have told her daughter what to expect from Jefferson, other white people, and other members of the enslaved community. She had many more years to provide counsel because she lived longer than most people of her day, black or white, enslaved or free.

B
Y THE BEGINNING
of February 1790, if not before, James Hemings knew with certainty that he would never go back to Paris with Jefferson. After weeks of mulling it over and discussing it with friends and family, Jefferson accepted the appointment as secretary of state. That ended his term as minister to France, and he never saw Paris again. New York, the capital of the new nation, was his next destination. Hemings had not been anticipating an exact return to the life he had known in Paris. Without his sister and Jefferson’s daughters, things simply could not be the same. He would not even return to the same house. Jefferson had decided, before they left the city, that he could not afford so grand a residence as the Hôtel de Langeac, and needed to find a less expensive alternative. Although Hemings would not be going back to the same surroundings there, Paris, a free society, versus New York, a slave society, was probably preferable to him. He had to say goodbye yet again to his family at Monticello and to whatever thoughts or plans he had about what he would do once he got back to France.
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It was also clear that the configuration of slaves and masters who had lived together overseas would never be reconstituted in the same way at any place on American soil. At some point after the party’s arrival in Norfolk on November 23, their trek through Virginia stopping at the homes of various relatives, and their return to Monticello one month later, Patsy Jefferson encountered her cousin Thomas Mann Randolph. The two became engaged, evidently sometime in January; one says “evidently” because it is not known exactly how their courtship began or progressed. Jefferson’s memorandum books and letters trace his visits to others’ homes during this period, but make no reference to Randolph or Tuckahoe. Jefferson learned of the couple’s plan sometime in January and on February 4 received a letter from Randolph’s father about the impending union. He quickly replied favorably to the match.
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Patsy, now called Martha, and Thomas had surely met as children, but cannot have known each other very well. She had been away from Monticello from the time she was eleven. Couples then and now do meet and fall in love at first sight, and that could have happened to this young pair, though that would not have been the only consideration in their time. As important as whatever love existed between them were the long-standing ties between the two families, ties that went back to the prospective fathers-in-law’s own fathers and to Jefferson’s family on his mother’s side—he was a Randolph himself through her line.
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It helped that Jefferson knew Tom Randolph, though in a very limited fashion. While he was still in Paris, Tom had written to him from Edinburgh, where he was studying, and Jefferson spoke well of his daughter’s future suitor.
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Although this was not a case of a young girl’s seeking to join her life’s fortunes to a totally unknown quantity, it was nearly so. Martha’s engagement to a man whom she could have known only as an adult for as little as three and, at most, seven weeks—four of which had been spent traveling from plantation to plantation when he would not have been with her all the time—is worth pausing over. Others who have chronicled Jefferson’s life have done so, sometimes providing their own explanations for what really was an extraordinary turn of events.

Henry Randall insisted that the couple had met and courted in Paris. That could be the only reason for so swift an engagement in Virginia. He knew how intensely devoted Jefferson’s eldest daughter was to him, a devotion he wrote movingly about in his biography. The idea that Martha could so hastily agree to leave her father’s home—before she had even begun to reacclimate herself to that home—seems to have unnerved the historian so much that he promoted the idea of a European romance between the young lovers that all evidence indicates did not occur.
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The couple’s granddaughter Sarah Randolph endorsed the idea of a meeting in the summer of 1788 as a possible start to her forebears’ romance. She apparently based this on a letter from Thomas Mann Randolph Sr. to Jefferson dated November 19, 1787, in which he said he told his son to go to Paris, as if a letter alone urging someone to go to a place, with no confirming after-the-fact circumstances, proved that the person actually went there.
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Thomas Jr. did not always do what his father said. That seems actually to have been the source of the great tension between them. At the end of December 1788, Jefferson said he had not heard from Tom Randolph for over a year and supposed that he had returned to America, which, in fact, he had. The young man wrote to his mother the preceding May, saying he was coming home, having decided not to go to Paris.
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Other, more modern considerations of this subject linked the quick engagement and marriage to Jefferson’s appointment as secretary of state. Things had to move quickly because he had to assume his post and did not want to miss the wedding.
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There was also the marriage settlement to think of. It had to be signed before the marriage took place, or it would have no legal effect. That answers the question about the timing of the wedding ceremony, not about how Martha came to accept so quickly a marriage proposal from a near-stranger on the very heels of her return from over five years in another country. She gave herself no time to get settled and think, and barely enough time to unpack. Love does that to some people, but it is almost impossible to view this lightning-quick courtship and marriage without taking note of its disappointing aftermath.

Unlike her sister Maria, Martha would not have a happy marriage. That she and Tom had twelve children over a long stretch of time was most likely due to the near-permanence of the marriage bond in those days and the lack of a culture of and access to birth control. Martha could not have refused Tom, even had she wanted to, though it was clear at some point that she wanted no more children. After the birth of her ninth child, Benjamin Franklin, she expressed the hope, in a day when abstinence was the only sure route to preventing conception, that he would be her last. She had three more after him. In the final period of her life, her family broken by debt, she viewed her eldest son’s growing family with great trepidation. Children were more burden than pleasure.
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Jefferson has been seriously criticized for the failure of his eldest daughter’s marriage, as if he were chiefly responsible for that. In the conventional narrative, for purely selfish reasons, he encouraged Martha’s loyalty to him over her husband, thus taking what was destined to be a happy marriage and wrecking it. On the other hand, Maria and John Wayles Eppes were able to be happy because they resisted Jefferson’s call to move to Pantops, a farm near Monticello, and generally lived outside of his influence. Both couples were free adults who bear primary responsibility for the way their lives turned out, both credit and blame—if any blame is to be laid. Maria and John Eppes’s marital happiness was not merely a function of Jefferson’s absence. There is every reason to believe that these two would have been happy wherever they were, because they loved each other and were truly compatible. They, in contrast to Tom and Martha Randolph, had known each other for many years before they married, and knew they suited one another. A hard look at Martha and Tom’s situation suggests that Jefferson was never the major problem with their union. The details of the Randolph marriage and family circumstances are worth considering closely at this point because the fallout from their domestic woes shaped life at Monticello—particularly the lives of Sally Hemings and her children from 1790 on.

All families have problems, of varying degrees of severity, but there has been a marked tendency in the presentation of the life of Jefferson and his white family to overlook some extremely serious issues the family had to confront. There are clear indications from Thomas and Martha’s eldest son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and from other observers, that his father was an unstable and physically abusive man. Jeff Randolph described him as capable of being “more ferocious than the woulf and more fell than the hyena.”
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No child says that about a father who is merely annoying or just somewhat overbearing. Tom Randolph must have done things to members of his family, hurt them in ways beyond being merely impecunious and neglectful. Wolves and hyenas are associated with violence and aggression. Indeed, Edmund Bacon remembers seeing Tom cane his eldest son when he was a grown man, a wholly inappropriate act designed to humiliate as much as to “correct.”
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By the time Bacon witnessed this, such things had probably been going on for a long while and may have been worse before the Randolphs moved to Monticello permanently in 1809.

Jeff Randolph denied Bacon’s account of post-adult whippings from his father in a broadside he published to refute some of Bacon’s more embarrassing stories about life at Monticello. The man more ferocious than a wolf and more “fell” than a hyena was transformed into a Virginian Saint Francis of Assisi. Tom Randolph may well have been all these things—the sinner/saint dichotomy always suppresses the complex nature of any human being’s life. Jeff Randolph was an old man by this time and could well have been seeing his father through the nostalgic haze that often covers memories of earlier life. Moreover, his father had reportedly begged his forgiveness on his deathbed. It is also clear that Jeff Randolph thought of himself as the guardian of his family’s reputation, and was willing to go to great lengths in that role even if it meant saying things that were not true.
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Thomas Mann Randolph is often written of as if his mental instability appeared only late in life—his poor financial circumstances and, again, Jefferson having driven him crazy. Evidence of Randolph’s problematic temperament already appeared in the young man, soon after his marriage. In the months immediately following the wedding, Jefferson set up and tried to shepherd through negotiations with Tom’s father to acquire one of his farms, Edgehill, as a family home for the newlyweds. Tom lost his temper during the negotiations and insulted his father so gravely that it caused a permanent rupture in their relations. They reconciled on the surface, but the elder man never really forgave or trusted his son again.
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Two years later, when his sister was thrown into a scandal involving their brother-in-law Richard Randolph, Tom wrote to the embattled young man facing a criminal prosecution and trying to find a way to defend himself. He threatened his kinsman, saying that he would personally “wash out with your blood the stain on my family.”
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Deviating from the well-documented typical pattern of youthful male aggressiveness in the late teens and early twenties that mellows, Randolph kept his rough edges well into his adulthood. He got into brawls. On one occasion, he struck his son-in-law Charles Bankhead in the head with an iron poker after Bankhead mistook him for a servant and cursed at him.
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He could easily have killed him. His temper and lack of self-control affected not just the immediate objects of his wrath but also his relations with all who knew him. Imagine Jefferson sending a man a graphic letter threatening to kill him, getting into fistfights above the age of boyhood, or hitting someone in the head with a poker. It is not known whether Tom Randolph ever directed his physical aggression toward Martha. He, like other aggressive men, may have drawn the line at hitting women—or he may not have. Even if he never physically abused Martha, it cannot have been easy for a woman used to the placid environment of life with a father who modeled a version of manhood that emphasized control over one’s emotions to be suddenly placed under the power of a man who had violent mood swings and felt no compunction about striking those who displeased him.

The family aggression replicated itself when Tom and Martha’s eldest daughter, Anne, married the above-mentioned Charles Bankhead, who repeatedly beat her even while they lived at Monticello. At least one time, he beat her in front of her mother. When Martha Randolph told Jefferson about the incident, he appealed to Bankhead’s father for support. They both tried to keep what had happened secret from Tom Randolph, fearing his reaction—although if there was ever a time to take a poker to a man, that was it.
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Bacon’s memory of Anne’s travails at the hand of her husband gave rise to another Jeff Randolph cover-up. In the same broadside in which he disputed Bacon’s claim that his father had caned him when he was an adult, Randolph flatly pronounced Bacon’s story of “Mr. Bankhead’s violence toward his wife” as “untrue,” hiding his sister’s suffering out of a sense of family shame, when he could have told the truth (Anne had done nothing shameworthy) or simply remained silent.
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Instead, he saw himself as preserving the family honor by lying, for he well knew that his brother-in-law beat his sister. Moreover, Randolph had his own personal experience with Bankhead’s violent tendencies. Decades before he denied that Bankhead beat his sister, Bankhead had almost killed Randolph, stabbing him when the two got into an altercation in a Charlottesville tavern. Bankhead’s beastliness was so taken as a given that as Jefferson contemplated this horrible family situation, he was concerned not only about his grandson’s life but about his granddaughter Anne’s. Bankhead, he feared, would take things out on her physically after his fight with her brother.
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Bankhead also physically attacked a member of the Hemings family, Burwell Colbert, no doubt drawing the enmity of the clan. Ellen Coolidge wrote of the elderly Jefferson’s indescribable anguish when he found out what had happened.
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Their grandfather’s home was undoubtedly a happy place for the Jefferson grandchildren; young people’s resilience allows them to absorb an enormous amount of distress without despair while focusing on the good things that happened to them. But the presence of one, and then two, unpredictable and violent males at the heart of the Jefferson-Randolph household cannot be treated as a minor detail; aggression is never without consequence. Although both men were periodically exiled from the family, their difficult personalities and actions inevitably affected the lives of all family members and others who came into close contact with them.