The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (60 page)

It is completely understandable that Jefferson, upon viewing his daughter married to an unstable man with a ferocious temper, might well have wished to provide a haven for her without being open about why the haven was required. When he learned of the horror his granddaughter Anne was living with her husband, he begged her—to no avail—to come live at Monticello. When she refused, he confided with deep sadness to a friend that he always expected her “to die at [Bankhead’s] hands.”
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We understand today much more about spousal abuse and that women like Anne stay in abusive relationships because they genuinely fear that their husbands will kill them if they leave. Often they are right. Bankhead was the sort who really might have killed Jefferson’s granddaughter.

Great stigma attached to both serious marital discord and emotional illness. These were not the kinds of things a man so private as Jefferson cared to speak of in his letters, and his reference to Anne’s problem shows that he was at a loss to do anything about her situation beside offering her a place of refuge. People were to carry on, entertaining friends and relatives, as if there were no problems at all. In the mid-1790s, Tom and Martha traveled from doctor to doctor looking for a cure to his unspecified or, perhaps, unknown illness.
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Jefferson wrote as if the illness caused Randolph’s depression, but it is also possible, given later descriptions of his emotional history, that depression was the actual root of the problem, and the difficulties with his “physical” health a mere byproduct.

While no one could have foreseen all of this at the couple’s beginnings in 1790, more time and more opportunities to observe Tom Randolph—and hear what a wider range of people knew of him—might have given Martha at least the small consolation of being able to say, as the years passed, that she knew what she was getting into when she married him. If Jefferson can be faulted for anything relating to his eldest daughter’s marriage, it is for not exercising greater vigilance about her entrance into what was, in his time, a permanent arrangement. In those first weeks after their return to America, his much vaunted possessiveness of Martha was nowhere in sight. She was vulnerable. Anyone would be disoriented after having spent almost six years away from home, five of them in a foreign country. She had gone from girl to woman in a different world. Yet her father quickly agreed to put her under the control of a man neither of them knew, understanding very well what marriage would mean for her. Not long after the wedding, he wrote to Martha saying that the happiness of her life now depended upon “continuing to please a single person.”
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This was not, as it is sometimes portrayed, merely a statement revealing Jefferson’s personal misogyny. Jefferson was speaking the plain truth. A married woman ceased to be her own person and was placed under the total dominion of her husband—by law. One who lives under the legal dominion of another, even if styled as a benevolent dominion or one grounded in “love,” is not in control of his or her happiness. If Martha was too in love to think straight about this, it was her only surviving parent’s job to think for her and suggest, at least, that they take their time. What was the rush, given all that was at stake?

At seventeen, Martha was younger than the average Virginia bride, and Tom was only twenty-one. When Tom’s sister Judith was set to marry Richard Randolph, under the same circumstances, her mother, Anne Cary Randolph, objected strenuously. Cynthia Kierner has noted that Randolph “hoped to delay Judith’s marriage and to keep all of her daughters single until, in her words, ‘they were old enough to form a proper judgment of Mankind, well knowing that a woman’s happiness depends entirely on the Husband she is united to.’”
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Randolph’s words, almost exactly tracking Jefferson’s, were written several years before Tom and Martha’s union. Having been a teenage bride herself, she knew very well what it meant to tie one’s life to a man under the facts of social life as it existed for women in her time, having baby after baby (she gave birth to thirteen) with no satisfactory way out even if one were deeply unhappy in one’s circumstances. Had she lived long enough to become Martha’s mother-in-law, Anne Randolph would have understood perfectly the risk this young girl was about to take and would not have been at all surprised at how her married life turned out. She knew that there were many reasons why a seventeen-year-old girl, married much too soon to a twenty-one-year-old man, might become unhappy and wish fervently to return to girlhood in her father’s home. Martha’s circumstances were even more striking and poignant; within a nine-month period she went from living a carefree, almost giddy life in a grand residence in Paris, attending balls with her friends, to living in a virtual swamp in a barely adequate house in the middle of nowhere with a man she did not know.
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Nothing about this signaled happily ever after.

One would not expect Jefferson to have had the same perspective on matters as Anne Cary Randolph. While her daughter’s impending marriage caused her to reflect upon her own ambivalence about the way her life as a woman had turned out, he would have looked at Randolph’s life and seen nothing at all amiss. What were women to do but get married, live under the direction of a man, and have his babies? Still, finding the
right
man was important, and it should have occurred to Jefferson that it might take Martha more than two or three weeks to do that.

It is very likely that Jefferson’s habitual optimism and early life experiences overrode any reluctance to support his daughter’s plan to get married so quickly when she did not have to. He had been brought as a little boy to live in Thomas Mann Randolph Sr.’s impressive residence, Tuckahoe. Although he was well used to gracious living from the time of his boyhood, Tuckahoe took that to another level. Well-appointed as it was, Shadwell did not rival his cousin’s home. The boys grew up together for a time in that house, Randolph the young master of it, Jefferson a kinsman, but nevertheless a guest in those more opulent surroundings. When the son of the boyhood master of Tuckahoe asked for his daughter’s hand, with the expectation that she would become the mistress of the place herself, Jefferson was not inclined to hesitate, even if he should have. The imprinted association of Tuckahoe with wealth and stability gave him the confidence to support the whirlwind engagement and marriage, even though he knew that Randolph Sr. carried a staggering amount of debt, inherited from his father-in-law, Archibald Cary. The trappings of Tuckahoe aside, Thomas Mann Randolph’s family was neither wealthy nor stable.
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Most important of all, Martha’s inexplicably quick courtship and marriage took place in a critical context. The very weeks that she met and married her future husband coincided with the period that Sally Hemings’s condition became more obvious. If Martha’s swift marriage was in any way her reaction to that, Jefferson was not in a good position to dissuade her from starting her own new life and household. He may indeed have been quite relieved. She was willing to go right away, and he was willing to let her go as fast as she wanted to. Family crises of this nature were not typically spoken of in the papers of white slave-owning families. It is unreasonable, therefore, to expect to be able to survey the family’s written record of itself and hope to find an answer openly displayed, or to attribute any significance to the absence of a forthright treatment of such matters. If an answer is to be found in written records, it will be hidden away or referred to indirectly, which is exactly what happened with Sally Hemings and her pregnancy in 1790.

Following the trajectory of Hemings’s life, and taking her seriously as a person, requires one both to notice when the trajectory veers and to look for an explanation for the change of course. It was a staple of life among upper-class slave-owning families that when the daughter of the household married, she was given a lady’s maid to attend her in her new role as wife, usually a female whom she already knew and who had attended her before.
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Through all the transformations that took place within the institution from the colonial period to the antebellum years, this phenomenon remained a constant to the point of cliché. Martha’s grandmother Martha Eppes brought Elizabeth Hemings to her marriage. Her mother took Betty Brown as her lady’s maid from the Forest with her when she married Jefferson. Sally Hemings, given her life up until 1790, could reasonably have expected, as she grew up, to follow in the footsteps of her mother and aunt and serve in the home of either Martha or Maria upon their marriages. Yet it was never to be.

Before Martha Jefferson wed Thomas Mann Randolph in February of 1790, her father drew up a marriage settlement earlier that month in which he gave her twenty-seven slaves.
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Tellingly, he did not give her Sally Hemings, the young woman who had been her lady’s maid for two years in France. That this very quickly created something of an issue for Martha was revealed in letters that passed between her, her aunt, and her father during the first half of that year. On July 2, 1790, while Jefferson was in New York serving as secretary of state, the newly married Martha wrote to him from Eppington, where she was living with her sister, “on the subject of a maid,” saying that she needed one. Jefferson referred to this letter in one he wrote on July 25 to her aunt Elizabeth Eppes. Martha, along with Polly, now called Maria, had been staying with her at Eppington during the late spring and early summer of 1790 while Martha’s husband got their home at Varina ready for them to live in later that season.
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While there, she discussed with her aunt the fact that she needed a maid. Eppes had written to Jefferson on June 4 about the same issue, but her letter arrived after Martha’s. Jefferson wrote, “Patsy has written me on the subject of a maid also, but adds that it will be time enough when we meet at Monticello. She will certainly never want any thing I can add to her convenience. I am in hopes, while in Virginia, to bring about arrangements which may fix her in Albemarle.”
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Like other correspondence that holds a promise of a substantive discussion of Sally Hemings, both letters from these two women written almost exactly a month apart, on the same topic, are missing from the collection of Jefferson’s letters. Although it is unlikely that either woman was totally candid or explicit about why Hemings would not be available to act as Martha’s maid, there may have been some general reference to her unavailability and a discussion of who among the enslaved women at Monticello already known to Martha might be a suitable replacement.

The slaves Jefferson gave his daughter were from one of his outlying plantations, and she could not have known any of the women well enough to trust them so much as the women house servants she had grown up with at Monticello. The point, however, is that both women wrote to tell Jefferson that Martha needed and wanted a maid. Jefferson, for obvious reasons, did not suggest to Eppes or his daughter that Hemings could continue in her role as a “convenience” that he was willing to provide, though when he returned to Monticello that fall, he did act upon his daughter’s request. He deeded Martha eight additional slaves, including the oldest daughter of Mary Hemings, Molly, who was about fourteen years old.
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Mary Hemings had been an important house servant of long standing, and Martha knew her and her children. It made perfect sense in the context of slavery at Monticello to give the teenager to Martha to serve as the maid she said she needed. Molly evidently continued with Martha for many years.
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Hemings was Maria’s maid, too, but her newly married sister was in far greater need of help in setting up what would be her new household with her husband than the thirteen-year-old who was back in her element with her beloved aunt, her cousins, and their slaves. The timing of Jefferson’s exchange of letters with Betsy Eppes and his daughter about providing a maid for Martha is critical, especially in light of his November conveyance of additional slaves to his older daughter. He knew, at least as early as July of 1790, that Maria’s circumstances were about to change drastically anyway. He had plans for her that would obviate the need for Sally Hemings to serve as her personal maid.

Earlier in the same month that Jefferson wrote to Eppes, as a partial result of some of his own very famous dealings with Alexander Hamilton, Congress had voted to move the capital from New York to Philadelphia on an interim basis before settling into its permanent home on the Potomac River. Even before the bill formally passed, Jefferson was so confident in its passage that he wrote to William Short on July 1, telling him to send his “baggage” from Paris to Philadelphia rather than to New York.
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The thought that his younger daughter might join him there came quickly to his mind, for in that same July letter to his sister-in-law, replying to her missive about getting Martha another maid, he informed her that he wanted “to consult” with her about Maria and thought that could be “best done at Monticello.” He invited her and her husband to visit him there during the coming fall. The Eppeses were apparently unable to join him for the face-to-face consultation, but sent Maria along. In October, Jefferson wrote to Elizabeth Eppes and announced that he was going ahead with the plan that he had obliquely referred to earlier in July. He had decided that Maria would remain at Monticello for the winter, but would join him in Philadelphia in the spring and be placed in a boarding school.
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When Maria went to live with her father in Philadelphia, Sally Hemings did not go with her. Instead, after a time, Jefferson hired a local woman to attend his daughter. Just as he eschewed giving Hemings to Martha upon her marriage, when Maria married seven years later, and Hemings was still a very young woman, Jefferson did not give her to his younger daughter either, despite their lifelong intimacy with one another.
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There was no enslaved female with whom Maria was more familiar, and no role that Hemings played until that time was of longer standing than being helper to Jefferson’s daughters. But they were going to get married and, presumably, live away from their father. After Hemings’s return from France, someone very important had an interest in having her stay at Monticello: Jefferson. Instead of giving Sally Hemings to Maria on her wedding, he gave her another of Mary Hemings’s children, Sally’s fifteen-year-old niece, Betsy.
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