The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (71 page)

The language of the document is telling. Jefferson presents himself as “desiring to befriend” Hemings and announces his intent to “require from him as little in return as possible” as Hemings trained the new Monticello chef. The language of friendship lays the groundwork for a future association, which Jefferson definitely wanted and sought in the years after Hemings’s emancipation. Referencing his “great expense” to have Hemings trained was also a justification for having him come back to Monticello as an unpaid trainer of a new cook to help Jefferson recoup his expenses. Finally, it was a not very subtle attempt to appeal to (or awaken) a sense of gratitude or guilt in Hemings. Whether this was a benevolent document (and whether that even matters, given the important end result that was achieved) is subject to debate.

The overall context in which the document appeared should also be considered. Jefferson, emotionally scarred from his battles with Alexander Hamilton, which he was losing at the time, had made a firm decision by the end of 1792 that he would retire when Washington finished his first term. He arranged to take a house about three miles outside of the city near the banks of the Schuylkill River, sending his furniture and, most important, his books back to Monticello, a clear sign of his seriousness because he cannot have expected to stay in Pennsylvania for very long without his books.
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Before he moved to the country in April of 1793, it was clear to Hemings, and all members of the household, that their days in the state were coming to a close. After Jefferson left office, Hemings would return to Monticello with Jefferson, Petit would go back to France, and Jefferson’s other employees would go on to new situations. By July, Jefferson had set on September as the end point for his term, and he told President Washington of his plans. It did not work out that way, for he was unable to resist Washington’s request that he stay on until January.
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Though Jefferson’s description of his house on the river makes the place sound charming, it may not have been for James Hemings, and one wonders how Petit felt about the change in scenery. This was clearly a place of needed respite for Jefferson. Here he escaped the scene of the bruising conflicts that had become integral to his position as secretary of state, while Hemings cooked and served him meals that he preferred to take outside under the trees surrounding his house whenever the weather allowed. “I never go into the house but at the hour of bed,” he wrote. Under his “high plane trees with good grass below,” he would “breakfast, dine, write and receive…company.”
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His enthusiasm about this bucolic life and the almost childlike delight he took in being able to stay outside as long as he wanted are understandable. His generally pleasant letters home to his daughter and son-in-law hint at, but do not come close to telling, the story of the really titanic political machinations (some put in motion by him, others by Hamilton) that were going on before and during his idyll on the banks of the Schuylkill.

All this may have meant something quite different to James Hemings. Though he was only several miles outside of the center of the city, he apparently did not crave the semirural isolation that Jefferson found so appealing. He had come of age in cities, and when he was emancipated he went back to them to live—first Philadelphia and finally Baltimore. One does not get the sense of a man who ever longed for the quiet life on his own little farm. He had never been an agricultural worker, and nothing suggests that he had any particular competence in that arena, or wanted to obtain it. What he knew how to do best could more easily be done in an urban setting.

Jefferson’s decision to move to the country might have been a life-saving one for both him and Hemings. By the beginning of August, five months after their departure from the house on Market Street, it was clear that something was going seriously wrong in Philadelphia. People began to come down with a mysterious illness that caused severe headaches and backaches, along with a high fever. After a few days, the skin of the victims turned yellow, and they began to vomit blood so dark that it looked black. This was the start of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, which would end up taking five thousand lives in the city. From August to November “10 to 15 percent of the estimated 45,000 Philadelphians perished, while another 20,000, including most government officials, simply fled.”
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No one knew where it came from or had any inkling that the “dense mass of” mosquitoes “that hung over the city like a cloud” were the vectors.
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Many blamed the refugees who had only recently arrived in the city fleeing the revolution in Saint Domingue, and others, like Jefferson, believed that the city’s cramped and sometimes dirty conditions were the culprits. Arguments over the fever’s origins and the best treatment for it broke down along political lines—the Federalist faction blamed the émigrés, and the Republican faction faulted the noisome environment.
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Jefferson’s flight from political turmoil, and the distasteful prospect of having to run into his enemies on the streets of Philadelphia, succeeded in getting Hemings out of the city in the spring, long before the evenings of the summer and early fall of 1793, when the disease wreaked its worst damage.

The epidemic, a catastrophe for all, hit the black community hard in a number of ways. As the cases and death toll rose, and inhabitants left the city, some blacks stayed to help out in the crisis. Not all remained voluntarily. Many were conscripted and prevented from leaving so that they could dig graves and attend the sick. Of those blacks who stayed by choice, a good number saw this as a chance to perform a heroic deed that might change the way the white community viewed blacks overall. Committed “race” men like Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, who had founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church with Allen, helped organize their efforts. Benjamin Rush had worked with these men before and urged blacks to stay, in part, because he thought they were naturally immune to the disease.
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Jefferson alluded to this supposed immunity when he observed to his son-in-law, “The pure blacks have been found insusceptible of the infection, the mixed blood has taken it.” What he thought more amazing was that “not a single instance of it occurred of anybody’s
catching
it
out of Philadelphia
” (emphasis in the original).
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Blacks were not totally “insusceptible” to yellow fever, and a number of black Philadelphians who stayed behind to help caught the disease and died. Those who escaped death were repaid for their efforts when the crisis abated with charges that they had taken advantage of their sick patients, either robbing them or overcharging them for services. Bishop Allen and Absalom Jones, ever vigilant to matters that affected their community, wrote a pamphlet refuting the charges and detailing the contributions of blacks to the relief effort. They also listed examples of the fees and payments for services that black nurses, drivers, and gravediggers rendered as they tried to help out during the crisis. There might have been people who acted inappropriately, they said, but the deeds of the minority should not have defined the character of the majority of blacks who risked their lives to help.
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When Washington talked Jefferson into staying in his position until the end of the year instead of leaving in September, he agreed to Jefferson’s plan to go to Monticello for a visit that month instead.
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James Hemings and Jefferson ended up leaving a week earlier than planned because Jefferson’s staff had dwindled down to one clerk, everyone else having fled to avoid the plague. In this harrowing time, the two men set out for Virginia knowing that they would not return to the house near the Schuylkill. Even though they did not know what caused yellow fever, all had noticed that the disease was seasonal—being particularly bad in the summer and disappearing in the cool weather. Hemings and Jefferson had reason to hope that by the time they returned, the epidemic would have abated or at least be in decline.

T
HEIR BRIEF SOJOURN
at Monticello over, Hemings and Jefferson set off from Monticello on October 25, 1793.
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They were not going back to Philadelphia. Germantown, just outside the city, had been designated the temporary seat of the government as officials tried to escape the ravages of yellow fever, whose depredations spared no one. Alexander Hamilton came down with the disease but recovered with some lingering effects, as well as Dolley Todd’s young husband, who lost his life. A year later, the young and vivacious widow remarried and became Dolley Madison, a woman who would come to have her own place in Hemings family history.
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On their return Robert Hemings rode with them as far as Fredericksburg and then went back to Monticello with the horses. Jefferson gave him money there for his expenses and bought tickets for himself and James Hemings for the stagecoach to Baltimore. When they got there, they met President Washington, who was on his way to the capital himself. There is no mention of him in Jefferson’s records, but Washington’s ever-present body servant, William Lee, was probably along, and he and Hemings may have encountered one another before.
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Since no public stages went “further North,” Jefferson had to hire a private driver—and was “fleeced,” he said—to take him and Hemings on to Germantown, on a journey in which the weather ran the gamut from hot to cold to dusty to rainy. The pair arrived to find a town overflowing with escapees from Philadelphia and yellow fever. There was no place to stay. Jefferson reported that he, the secretary of state, “as a great favor” had gotten “a bed in the corner of a public room of a tavern” and had to stay there until “some of the Philadelphians” left the city.
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Hemings was there with him, because no other place was to be had in the city, every available accommodation being full. They remained in those circumstances for several days until they found more permanent lodging and Hemings was able to settle back into his responsibility for taking care of the household. Jefferson paid him his month’s wages and gave him money to purchase items for their daily needs.

Hemings’s Germantown stay proved short. By December 1 he and Jefferson were back in a Philadelphia that was “entirely clear of all infection” with everyone ready to take up where they had left off. But Jefferson had no house, so he rented rooms in the home of Joseph Mussi on “the corner of Seventh and Market.”
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There was not enough space for Petit, who boarded at a nearby tavern. The men lived this strange existence—a chef with no kitchen to cook in, a master of the house with no house—for five weeks. Hemings may actually have enjoyed this, as it relieved him of some pressure, for Mussi’s Italian chef prepared Jefferson’s meals for the entirety of his stay. It also gave Hemings the chance to observe the differences and similarities in the preparation and, no doubt, taste of another of the world’s great cuisines. The displaced chef, however, still had responsibilities, managing all of Jefferson’s household expenses. Petit seems to have been primarily biding his time waiting to leave the country. As he had in France, Jefferson periodically borrowed money from his maître d’hôtel while he was in his service in Philadelphia. The men settled all their accounts in January of 1794, and Petit returned to his native land.
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From their very different positions in the world, both Hemings and Jefferson believed they were coming to a breaking point in their lives. Jefferson, frustrated and demoralized by the political setbacks during his time in Washington’s administration, saw this as the end of his long public career and looked longingly toward Monticello as if he were going there to take a cure. Hemings had his own reasons to be eager. The sooner he began to train a new chef, the sooner he could return to Philadelphia, or wherever he wanted to go, as a free man.

Robert Hemings

Even though his younger brother seemed likely to gain his freedom first, it was the eldest son of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles who in the end received a formal deed of emancipation from Thomas Jefferson before any of the other Hemingses. Robert Hemings and his relatives surely knew of Jefferson’s agreement with his younger brother, and this could only have raised his own expectations. Though he had not traveled as widely as James, Robert had taken his own serious steps toward freedom and needed a life away from Monticello. He was a husband and father whose family lived elsewhere. After the brief turn in New York, he returned to Monticello whenever Jefferson called for him, being his manservant, carrying messages back and forth between Jefferson, his daughter, and son-in-law, just as he had since boyhood. He even spent time in Jefferson’s Philadelphia home.
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By 1794 his wife, Dolly Hemings, had moved from Fredericksburg to Richmond. At some point during that year, Robert Hemings and Dolly’s owner, Dr. George Frederick Stras, worked out a deal. Stras would buy Hemings’s freedom from Jefferson, and then Hemings would repay Stras. Robert’s gambit seems to have taken Jefferson by surprise, and he was not happy about it at all. In fact, he was extremely angry at Hemings. He decided to go along with the proposal and wrote up a deed of manumission stating that he had “manumitted and made free Robert Hemings, son of Betty Hemings: so that in future he shall be free and of free condition…and shall be discharged of all obligation of bondage or servitude whatsoever….”
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