The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (65 page)

Before the formal end of the summer, Hemings left New York, knowing that after a brief stay at Monticello he would have to help set up a new household in Philadelphia. Jefferson headed south with James Madison, adopting a leisurely pace as they stopped at various sites, Philadelphia for a few days, and other places, including Mount Vernon. It is not clear whether Hemings traveled with the pair or, if so, for how long. Once Jefferson and Madison reached Montpelier, Madison’s Orange County plantation, Madison lent Jefferson a “servant” (again, their vernacular for “slave”) for the one-day journey to Monticello. Jefferson noted that he paid for “oats,” evidently for his horses and “servts breakfts” at an inn en route to his home, and that he gave a tip to Madison’s servant before he went back to Montpelier. It is likely that the other servant who ate breakfast at the inn was Jefferson’s coachman, Seche, who worked for him until the fall of 1792.
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James Hemings apparently traveled to Monticello on his own, covering territory that was well known to him. What he found when he got there was a place and a family at the beginning of a transition, and it would turn out that Philadelphia was the last leg of his journey out of slavery.

T
HE NATION’S CAPITAL
now moved from New York to Philadelphia. James Hemings moved there, too, to continue his job as chef after a brief interlude at Monticello with his family in the fall of 1791. His early days in the city were somewhat unsettled because he could not immediately move into the house Jefferson had chosen to live in on High Street (Market Street).
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Once again, the inveterate architect and builder had ordered extensive renovations, and they were not yet finished and would not be for weeks to come. He wanted a “book room, stable, and [a] garden house,” added to the already well-appointed dwelling. The owner, Thomas Lieper, had actually “spared no expense” on the place, and if it was not quite the Hôtel de Langeac, it was far more than the “small” and “indifferent” residence that Hemings had come to know in New York. The interior was “expensively finished” with “stucco cornices, doweled floors, oversize window panes, and mahogany balusters and handrails.”
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By the time Jefferson was finished, Hemings was restored to the sort of opulent surroundings he had known in Paris—in very exalted company, as things turned out. President Washington lived on the same street, just three blocks away.
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The new head of state was probably a familiar sight to Hemings as they both went about their business, sharing the same streets but living in their own respective worlds. All eyes were on the new president.

While waiting for the workers to complete enough of the renovations to allow them to move in, Hemings lived in a boardinghouse along with the other servants Jefferson hired for his new residence, giving him more new people to get used to. His duties as chef and servant in charge of household accounts started around January 8, 1791, the day Jefferson noted that he began to “dine at home.”
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Even after the formal routine of Hemings’s life got under way, matters were still in disarray. Work on the house continued, and Jefferson’s staggering quantity of “books, household goods, furniture, paintings and papers” arrived at the end of October. There was no place to put the things at first, so he stored them at phenomenal expense on a Philadelphia wharf. Seventy-eight crates out of the eighty-six he had shipped from France were to be brought to High Street, while the other eight went to Monticello.
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In what must have been quite a memorable event, when the house was ready, Hemings saw “twenty-seven wagon loads” worth of Jefferson’s possessions arrive at his door. That was not all. The items from the New York residence had to be incorporated into the house as well, a herculean task that took weeks to accomplish. The professional packing service Jefferson hired in France had meticulously prepared the crates to guard against damage on the transatlantic voyage. Unpacking was no easy thing. Each container cradled the goods inside in either “strong packing cloths; various kinds of paper, flannel…nearly 400 pounds of shredded paper, 624 bundles of rye straw and 36 bundles of hay for cushioning.”
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Jefferson wrote to his daughter with almost childlike glee, “I am opening my things from Paris as fast as the workmen will make room for me.”
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He was not doing that by himself. It is more likely that Hemings and the other servants who were on board by then were responsible for doing the bulk of this work when they were not about their basic duties.

Amid all the turmoil of his daily environment, Hemings continued to live his odd existence between slavery and freedom. Because Jefferson refused to hire a maître d’hôtel during the wait for Petit to arrive, he was, as he had been in New York, in charge of the household with no boss besides Jefferson. He was paid the same rate, or more, as the other servants and, unlike them, still received occasional gifts of money for his personal use. Jefferson continued to buy some of his clothes and even had clothing made for him by his own tailor.
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He was trying to make Hemings as comfortable in his condition as possible, perhaps because he knew what the young man had given up by deciding to come back to America.

Philadelphia, however, was no more Paris than was New York. What it lacked in exotic energy for Hemings, it more than made up for in the hopeful attitude of the African Americans living there. There was no easy place for blacks in the United States during these years, merely places that were less hard than others. Philadelphia was “less hard” than Virginia. It was, for a time, the locus of rising expectations for American blacks, though their hopes were often dashed, with all too brief bittersweet victories punctuated by disappointing setbacks and generally rough times. Pennsylvania had enacted the nation’s first gradual emancipation statute in 1780. Though the first, it was also more timid in its effect than the similar laws that followed. The legislation did not liberate people currently in bondage; it freed children born after the passage of the act. Even those children were not immediately freed, for the law bound them to service to the men and women who would have owned them outright, but for the statute, until they reached the age of twenty-eight. That construction of the rules kept slavery in Pennsylvania decades after the statute was passed. In addition, many of the freed slaves and their children were forced into a form of long-term indentured servitude that resembled slavery.
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White supremacy and ideas about the sanctity of private property came together to mandate a compromise designed to end slavery, but to do so with the least amount of disruption to slave owners’ lives. Blacks were bitterly disappointed by the gradual nature of the statute’s self-described “step to universal civilization.”
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How could one speak of an evil that one was willing to tolerate for perhaps decades when it was in the power of the legislature to purge it? The question, of course, was whom did the legislators most mind hurting—present-day white slave owners who would suffer economic and psychological losses if the people they were enslaving were freed immediately, or present-day black slaves who were suffering under slave owners’ power?

Despite favoring masters over slaves, the drafters of the legislation were actually serious about having people comply with the provisions they did enact. By the time Hemings arrived, they had already learned that a large number of masters were taking advantage of loopholes in the law. To curb the many “evils and abuses arising from ill disposed persons,” the state passed another statute in 1788. It was designed to interdict masters’ creative ways of skirting the law, including sending pregnant women out of the state until they delivered their children and selling out-of-state slaves who were in the twenty-eight-year period of servitude.
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New York would not pass its gradual-emancipation statute until 1799.
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While Hemings was in the city, there were enough free blacks in his view to give him a sense of what it was like to live with relatively large numbers of free blacks, but with no positive state law providing a principle to guide the whole community. Now he was living in yet another society that had moved against the institution that formed the basis of his life with Jefferson. There was at least one similarity between the law passed in Pennsylvania and the
Police des Noirs
, as interpreted in the Parisian Admiralty Court. Both laws contained a registration requirement. There was a crucial difference, however. In Pennsylvania, in contrast to France, residency was a serious issue. The law was supposed to apply only to those who resided there. To establish some parameters for what that meant, the 1780 act mandated freedom for slaves whose owners resided in the state for more than six months.
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The law was passed during the time of the Second Continental Congress, when Philadelphia was the seat of the Revolutionary government. Because it was clear that some members of Congress were going to be slave owners, it was thought necessary to accommodate a way of life that was legally recognized throughout the rest of the country. Section 10 of the statute provided that “Delegates in Congress from the other American states, foreign Ministers and Consuls, and person passing through or sojourning in this state, and not becoming resident therein” were exempted from the operation of the law.
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The
Police des Noirs
, on the other hand, made no concession to foreign diplomats. France, one of the world’s two great powers, could afford to be high-handed about these matters. The fledgling United States could not. Sectional tensions over slavery had to be smoothed over for the sake of union, and the new nation wanted to be able to receive emissaries from countries that might become allies.

By the 1790s, when the country had a formal government, with members of Congress, a president, a vice-president, and a cabinet, the terminology in section 10’s exemption made no sense. Why allow members of Congress to keep their slaves in Philadelphia indefinitely, but not the president and secretary of state, or other slaveholding members who had come to serve in the government? President Washington, who had not lived under the law in Philadelphia, because he was away leading the Continental Army, was so worried about the language in the statute suggesting that his slaves might go free after six months that he asked a subordinate to study the law. If it was found to apply to him, he gave instructions to find some “pretext” to send the slaves home that would “deceive” his slaves and “the Public” in a way that allowed him to avoid the law’s application. For this, he could tell a lie.
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While Washington was so worried about the gradual-emancipation statute that he took to shuttling slaves between Philadelphia to Virginia, Jefferson showed no signs of concern about the matter. He and Hemings stayed in Philadelphia for long stretches of time. In 1791, but for a one-month stay at Monticello and a one-month tour through upstate New York, the pair lived in Philadelphia continuously. In 1792 they were there for ten months and in 1793 for another eleven months.
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Jefferson had lived for over five years under a requirement that he register James and Sally Hemings, and he had ignored it successfully. Unlike Washington, he had seen and thought enough about law to know that, if tested, the statutory intent of the act of 1780 could rather easily be fleshed out in a way that kept him safe. While the exemptions did not, for the reasons mentioned above, include the term “secretary of state”—in 1780 there was no such title—it did designate men who came to Philadelphia to be part of the government in 1780 as people who were to be exempted from the law because they were not Pennsylvania residents. The law clearly intended to protect public servants of the national government from the application of the rule at a time when all public servants of the United States were “Delegates in Congress.”
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Jefferson knew that laws are words on a page to be interpreted by lawyers and judges, and he undoubtedly surmised that under no reasonable construction could the law have been meant to apply to men in his circumstance.

Two Supreme Court cases decided in the years after Hemings and Jefferson left the state, one favoring an enslaved man, the other, a slave owner, support the idea that Jefferson was exempt from the law. In
Butler v. Hopper
, the South Carolina congressman Pierce Butler tried without success to maintain his property interest in a man named Ben. Under the facts as presented in the case, Butler had lived in Philadelphia from 1794 until the dispute came before the Court in 1806. Although he went home to South Carolina for annual visits, he kept a house in Philadelphia, and even stayed there during a two-year period when he was not a member of Congress, but was serving as a representative in the South Carolina legislature.
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The Court rejected Butler’s claimed exemption from the statute, saying he had “lost the privilege” when he “ceased to be a member of congress” for two years. Was he, when not a member of Congress, a mere “sojourner,” Butler’s alternative theory for exemption, during that two-year period? The Court found it unnecessary to address that question, because it accepted the findings of fact below: Butler was a resident of Philadelphia and not exempt from the law. He had actually lived in Philadelphia since the 1780s, in the famous “Butler mansion,” and continued to do so until he died in 1822, even being buried in the city. There were more than enough incidental facts to prove Butler’s deep connection to Pennsylvania. Jefferson was secretary of state the whole time he was in Philadelphia with Hemings. Unlike Butler, he had no gap in his public service to take him out of the exemption for public officials, and if he had, he would have spent it at Monticello, not in Philadelphia. Throughout his long public career, he hastened there every time he got the chance. There was no doubt where Jefferson considered home.
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In
Negro Lewis v. Holloway
, a slave brought suit against a member of the House of Representative, Langdon Cheves, who remained in Philadelphia during a “recess of congress” that lasted for more than six months. Because Congress was not in session, the enslaved Lewis argued, the congressman was merely a resident and not entitled to the exemption. Lewis lost the case. The Court’s opinion, written by Bushrod Washington, George’s nephew, relied heavily upon the legislative intent of the act in light of the compromises over slavery that had made union possible. Washington found it inconceivable, “that the legislature of Pennsylvania could have intended to make a law, the probable consequence of which would have been the banishment of congress from the state.”
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Southerners would never have agreed to Philadelphia as a capital if they had ever been in danger of losing their slaves when they came there to serve the government.