The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (69 page)

Much as it cheered Banneker and his supporters, Jefferson’s reply to the black man enraged some prominent southerners. One, and apparently others, took his letter as a tocsin that he wanted to do away with slavery immediately, which was never the case. Every plan he ever conceived of along those lines contemplated a period of delay, as had been suggested by Condorcet and adopted by several northern states in the wake of the Revolution. One critic focused in on his signing off his letter, “I am with great esteem, Sir Your most obedt. humble servant,” the entirely formulaic closing common in letter writing of that time. Indeed, that was how Banneker had closed his letter to Jefferson. The problem, of course, was that their mutually respectful letters and mirrored closings suggested equality between the two. Jefferson had let down the side by engaging Banneker in this fashion.
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In the realm of personal interactions, Jefferson had no problem with extending common courtesies to black people. He once rebuked his grandson for not bowing to a black man who had bowed to them while they were walking together on the street. Jefferson had returned the gesture and wondered aloud to his grandson why he let a black man be more of a gentleman than he. Throughout all the years Henrietta Gardiner was employed as his washerwoman, he invariably referred to her in his own records as “Mrs. Gardiner,” never as Henrietta.
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Part of Jefferson’s great skill as a politician lay in his ability to intuit and respond to how others would react to certain words or actions, not a trait that was easy for him to turn on and off, and it showed itself in many vastly different contexts. He would not have expected the black man to have assailed him for failing to bow or Mrs. Gardiner to have shown offense had he called her Henrietta, but it was easier to follow the policy of being nice and respectful if it really cost him little to do so. He apparently did not think these niceties in his one-on-one encounters with blacks cost him very much, for, in truth, they did not. Whether he styled himself as Banneker’s “obedient servant,” returned the bow of a black man, or called a black woman Mrs. Gardiner, he was still a white man who was the master of black people on his plantation and viewed as the social superior of all other blacks and the vast majority of whites.

George Washington, who was much more formal than Jefferson in every sense, did think such things mattered. He evidently did not easily recognize last names for black people. When he wrote of his manservant William Lee, with whom he seems to have spent more time than anyone else, he could not resist styling him “William (calling himself William Lee).”
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In 1775 when he replied to the young poet Phyllis Wheatley, who dedicated one of her poems to him, he addressed her as “Miss Phillis,” even though it was well known that she was married. Washington, as did Jefferson in his letter to Banneker, had kind words for her work. He could hardly be too critical of a poem containing the following couplet:

Both Washington and Jefferson believed in white supremacy, because that was as much the currency of their time and place as was male dominance over females, but those who hold to that doctrine do not always express it in the same way. Washington was willing to go on record praising Wheatley’s poetry, but would not address her with an honorific attached to her name. Jefferson went on record disparaging her poetry, but would not have hesitated to call her Miss or Mrs.

Given the nature of their association, it is hard to imagine that Jefferson did not mention to James Hemings his contact with Banneker as the matter unfolded, if only in a “
You’re a black person, see what this other credit to your race has done
” fashion and to let James know that he had helped get Banneker a job surveying the Federal City. Whether Jefferson told him about it or not, Hemings almost certainly came to hear about the correspondence very soon—and perhaps read a copy of it—because it was widely circulated the following year in Philadelphia and other places where abolitionists had a presence. It was exactly the kind of thing any person of color would have been interested in at the time. Hemings was living in the home of a white man whom some blacks and their supporters looked to in their desperation for any glimmer of hope, no matter how small. Banneker told Jefferson that he was writing to him because he had the reputation of being a “friend” to black people. Jefferson’s friendship with Benjamin Rush, who was well known in the black community, probably helped shape black Philadelphians’ view of him.
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They may also have heard that he had given money to help Richard Allen build the AME Church. One cannot discount the possibility that the black people who dealt with Jefferson, like Henrietta Gardiner, and even James Hemings, circulated stories about him that suggested that he was, at least, approachable. Banneker had written from Maryland, but news traveled quickly and far in black circles. That is how fugitive slaves knew to run to Philadelphia and seek help from likely friends in the city.

Jefferson’s very human contradictions have long bedeviled observers, but James Hemings and his family had to live with them. It formed the basis of their lives. Hemings would have immediately recognized Jefferson’s instinct to be polite to Banneker, because he had witnessed such displays directed toward him and other blacks. He would also not likely have been surprised to see Jefferson’s later waffling on Banneker’s accomplishments after suffering public ridicule for having praised the astronomer. Nor would it have shocked Hemings to know that Jefferson suggested that Banneker’s “white” blood and that of others offered to him as examples of black achievement might account for their talent. He and other members of the Hemings family were burdened by and benefited from Jefferson’s construction of race and his ambivalent attitude about slavery and emancipation. That was one of the reasons he was in Philadelphia as a slave when Jefferson communicated with Banneker, yet poised on the threshold of making a radical transformation of his life.

E
LIZABETH
H
EMINGS AND
her children lived through the Age of Revolution. The end of the 1780s and the beginning of the 1790s saw the denouement of one, in America, and the beginnings of two others, in France and in one of its colonies, Saint Domingue. From the British invasion of Richmond to the malaria and smallpox-infested encampment at Yorktown and to the storming of the Bastille, several of Elizabeth Hemings’s children had an ironic presence at galvanizing struggles for social transformation. Ironic, because these upheavals were not designed to bring about a revolution in their own particular circumstances; and if any people needed a transformation of their lives, it was the Hemingses and other American slaves.
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Although the American Revolution failed to end slavery in the South, or immediately to destroy it in the North, it did change, for a time, the nature of the conversation about the institution. In the wake of revolution, and talk of the natural right to freedom, Virginia liberalized its emancipation law in 1782, allowing individuals to free their slaves without the permission of the state. The rhetoric of political revolution was not the only influence. Religion played an important role as well. Denominations that had first appealed to nonelite white Virginians, Baptists and Methodists, the latter guided by the abolitionist and, for his day, antiracist sentiments of John Wesley, sent ministers throughout Virginia in the 1790s preaching the gospel. Methodists, in particular, urged any of their members who owned slaves to free them. A number of them did. In ways that might astonish modern observers, black and white Virginians in the early Republic worshipped together in Methodist services, sometimes with black men, often still enslaved, acting as lay preachers. This, not surprisingly, drew the enmity of those who feared alliances between ordinary whites and black people of any status. When large numbers of upper-class white Virginians began to join the church during the first years of the nineteenth century, they insisted on marginalizing blacks, persuading any lower-and middle-class whites who might think otherwise that racial affinity was vastly more important than religious affinity. Soon churches that had urged their members to free slaves began to own slaves themselves.
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The revolution in Saint Domingue brought a flood of refugees into the United States, many to Virginia towns like Richmond and Norfolk, telling stories of the bloody and successful slave revolt. The specter of blacks killing whites for their freedom struck terror in the hearts of Virginians. By the end of the 1790s, the small spirit of liberalization the American Revolution had brought to race relations in Virginia began to dissipate in the wake of white Virginians’ fears that enslaved people would follow the course they had taken with Great Britain: engage in armed conflict against their oppressors.

At the beginning of the decade, however, the Hemingses lived in a Virginia where more subversive ideas were being offered in the marketplace, with a small, but growing, population of freed blacks whose presence served as both provocation and inspiration. As to provocation, most whites simply did not want these blacks without masters around. Their very existence severed the link between blackness and slavery and reminded the enslaved that freedom was a real possibility. Stifling the imaginations of blacks—and of whites inclined to be sympathetic to them—became the order of the day, discouraging thoughts that there could be any real change in the way black and white Virginians went through the world together. With most blacks laboring under the disabilities of slavery, life was made hard for those who became free.
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As to inspiration, free blacks provided enslaved members of their race with a hopeful example of what could be if they somehow managed to break free. They saw them acting on their own as artisans and farmers, some failing under the weight of white hostility, others making decent lives for themselves. A cogent equation was projected: black did not have to equal slave.

Thenia and Mary Hemings

If any enslaved people were in a position to hope that they might benefit from the slight, but important, change in atmosphere in Virginia, it was Robert and James Hemings. They had existed on the cusp of freedom for many years, the younger brother literally a carriage ride away from it in France. They were not alone in being restless. Something happened at Monticello between 1790 and 1794 that never happened again. In that five-year period, five of the Hemings siblings, four who had played major roles at Monticello, decided they wanted to be somewhere else—one way or another.

The least well-known among this group was Thenia Hemings, John Wayles’s oldest daughter with Elizabeth Hemings. In 1794, when she was twenty-seven years old, she was sold to James Monroe, along with her five daughters, Mary, Lucy, Betsy, Susan, and Sally.
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Jefferson never wrote why he sold the family, but it was almost certainly at Thenia Hemings’s request. She was, after all, a Wayles daughter, and Jefferson’s attitude toward this group of siblings virtually rules out his having decided on his own to sell her away from her family on the mountain. Neither the sale nor the purchase of five little girls (age ten down to infants) would have given either Jefferson or Monroe much immediate value. The father of Hemings’s children must have lived on Monroe’s plantation or nearby, and the sale was carried out to unite her family. Most, if not all, of these children had been born while Jefferson was in Paris, and a number of the enslaved people at Monticello were hired out to neighboring farms.

Thenia Hemings had a direct connection to James Monroe dating from that period. Her brother Martin had hired himself out to Monroe as a butler or manservant even before other Jefferson slaves were rented out by Nicholas Lewis. Thenia had gone to work in a home in Staunton, Virginia, in 1786, but there is no indication of how long she was there.
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The circumstances suggest that she might have worked at or near Monroe’s after she returned from Staunton and formed a relationship with a man while there. Jefferson’s memorandum to Nicholas Lewis written in November of 1790 and listing “Ursula, Critta, Sally, Bet, Wormeley and Joe,” along with “Betty Hemings,” as the “house-servants” at Monticello strongly suggests that Thenia Hemings was not at the plantation, or she would have been on that list with her mother and sisters. Everything that had happened in her family in the early 1790s told Thenia Hemings that, if she wanted to live with her husband and family, she had a good chance of having that happen. What time she had with them turned out to be far too brief; she died the year after her formal sale to Monroe.
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There was probably more than one reason for the exodus of Hemings siblings from Monticello in the first half of the 1790s. The world seemed to be falling apart there, or, one should say, it had never really been put back together again after Martha Jefferson’s death. Jefferson had been gone from Monticello, effectively, for almost eight years. The appointment as secretary of state took him away from the mountain the overwhelming majority of the time he was in office. Except for his sojourn in France, he would never again be away from home for such a concentrated period as between 1790 and 1794, not even when he was the president. Given his absence, he could not exercise the same influence over the imaginative lives of those who lived on the mountain. The unsettled circumstances there brought opportunities for some family members and allowed them to think more expansively about what could happen in their lives. The situation at home, along with the subtle transformations taking place in Virginia’s slave society, may well have emboldened members of the family to approach Jefferson about making the changes they wanted in their lives. And then, of course, there was Sally Hemings. Her siblings knew that she had successfully negotiated with him and that he was a man who might be reasoned with. Whatever they felt about the situation on the merits, Hemings’s brothers and sisters cannot have looked at Jefferson in the same way as they did before he went to France. When they asked him for things now, it was in the context of a new connection between them.

Not all the members of the family had realistic prospects for the kind of changes that Robert and James Hemings were able to engineer. Gender and degrees of family affiliation mattered greatly. The most exact counterparts to Robert and James—Thenia, Critta, and Sally Hemings—could never have expected to persuade Jefferson to free them outright. If no free black man or white man sought to buy her, the most that Thenia or Critta Hemings could hope for from Jefferson is what Thenia accomplished, a sale to be united with an enslaved husband who lived elsewhere. As we have seen, Jefferson believed that women, all women, were supposed to be under the control of a man, preferably a white man. In fact, the first member of the family to formally break away at her own initiative was Mary Hemings. In April of 1792 Jefferson wrote to Nicholas Lewis about her: “I am not certain whether I gave you power to dispose of Mary according to her desire to Colo. Bell, with such of her younger children as she chose. If I did not, I now do it, and will thank you to settle the price as you think best.”
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Mary Hemings found one way to leave the mountain: exchanging masters—attaching herself to a man who never formally freed her or their children, but who ultimately acted more as her husband than as her owner. Yet this was not a clean break. Jefferson did not let all of her family go. In uniting one biological family unit—the Bells and their children—he broke apart another. “With such of her younger children as she chose” meant that her two older children, Joseph and Betsy (probably “Elizabeth,” after her grandmother), had to stay at Monticello. In fact, Joseph Fossett was only twelve and his younger sister, Betsy, only nine when they were separated from their mother. The youngsters continued on, most likely looked after by their grandmother and aunts. Although they were geographically close, and there was always much contact between Monticello and Mary Hemings Bell’s house, there were, no doubt, many painful nights for Joseph, Betsy, and their mother.

By the time Hemings was separated from Joseph and Betsy, as was noted earlier, her oldest children, Daniel and Molly, had already been given away. So having her offspring taken from her was nothing new. But nothing in the human makeup would allow a parent to view this as inconsequential. There could be no greater impetus to escape, however one could, a system that allowed such a thing to happen. It is almost inconceivable that Mary Hemings would not have chosen, if given the opportunity, to have all her children together with her. Although Bell may have wanted to buy only his son and daughter, Jefferson’s instructions suggest that Joseph and Betsy were not for sale. Joseph Fossett became one of his most important artisans, and it is possible that Jefferson may have seen his potential and had plans for him early on. Like her brother, Betsy Hemings was kept on the mountain because Jefferson and his family were already looking to the future. The nine-year-old would be groomed for the role she eventually took on: Sally Hemings’s replacement as the personal maid for Jefferson’s daughters.

The most salient aspects of the Bell-Jefferson transaction were not written about. The deal was presented in a way designed to evade any understanding of its true meaning, guaranteeing that anyone who chose to rely primarily on the family letters of slave owners to tell the story of their lives with their slaves would never figure out what actually happened. In other business deals—who the parties really were to one another, what they were trying to accomplish and why, and where their real interests lay—were often presented in revealing detail, or in letters referring to the transaction. To see Jefferson and Lewis in operation in this circumstance (for it is unlikely that Lewis, who had leased Hemings to Bell and lived in the area, did not know their true relationship) is to view the shadow world of slavery at work. Here Jefferson was instructing his agent to sell a white man the enslaved black woman he was living with along with the two children she had borne him, writing in a manner that made clear that her two older children, who did not belong to the man, were not for sale.

One would never know that from any of Jefferson’s letters to Lewis. A more curious reader, however, might wonder why Mary wanted to be sold to Thomas in the first place, and why being owned by Thomas Bell was preferable to being owned by Thomas Jefferson and living with all her children. One might also wonder why only her “younger” children were allowed to go, especially since one of the older children was not really that old. Even in the shortened childhood of slavery in general, and at Monticello specifically, a nine-year-old was still a child. Why separate Betsy from her mother without even an attempt to make her available for sale? That these “younger children” were born during Hemings’s time in Bell’s home might also raise an eyebrow.

Naturally, the Hemings family knew the story of Mary and Thomas Bell. In their world, however, their explanation for the underlying meaning of this cryptically rendered transaction would not likely have been accepted as valid for purposes of history. The Hemingses, and other American slaves, have a dubious distinction in Western civilization. They are the only victims of a historically recognized system of oppression who are made to carry the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that things endemic to their oppression actually happened to them, as if enslaved people were a powerful government making accusations against relatively powerless, and presumptively innocent, people—slaveholders. This standard, borrowed from law, and others discussed more fully in chapter 3 hold sway in mainstream historical determinations of paternity in the southern slave system. Just as they did during slavery, these strategically restrictive standards protect masters against the claims of their black female slaves in order to preserve the racial integrity of white family lines—an interest often assumed to be of far greater importance than the family identity of African Americans. In the morality of this setting of the balance of interests, only Thomas Bell (and perhaps any of his contemporary
white
relatives who might claim the African American Hemingses as their relatives) had the power to make the story of Mary Hemings’s life under slavery real within the pages of mainstream American history. By eventually acknowledging his children, he gave permission for everyone to see, and say, what Jefferson was really talking about in his letter to Lewis.