The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (76 page)

If whites were uneasy, blacks in Richmond and other places immediately identified with the rebels in Saint Domingue. By the end of the 1790s, the talk of the rebels’ success on the island inspired an enslaved blacksmith, Gabriel, to recruit black men—and lower-class whites, he hoped—to seize the armory at Richmond, take Governor James Monroe hostage, and force the end of slavery in Virginia. The evidently widespread plot, in place by 1799, was foiled, but the fear it struck in white Virginians changed the climate in the state. If the American Revolution prompted emancipation in the North, and brought liberalized emancipation to Virginia, Gabriel and Saint Domingue led to retrenchment. The charismatic blacksmith and many of his followers were hanged, along with some number of others who may not have been involved. “We were too lax,” white Virginians explained, and local communities began to pass laws prohibiting, among other things, the congregation of enslaved blacks and free blacks, a pairing seen as the root of the “evil” of the uprising.
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One wonders what Robert Hemings knew of these matters. Dr. Stras, his erstwhile benefactor, was a French émigré. Robert and Dolly were connected to his household when the turmoil on the island began, and he certainly had thoughts about the matter. It is possible, indeed probable, that Robert Hemings, whose business brought him into daily contact with members of the public, actually knew Gabriel, or at least knew of him. The blacksmith apparently cut an impressive figure in the town, and the population of blacks was not so large that there could have been many degrees of separation between people of color. Information affecting their community could not have been kept from them. The slave/African American network being what it was, it is very likely that Hemings had heard something of Gabriel’s plan to fight for freedom for all enslaved Virginians. Hemings already had his freedom. He just had to make the most of it in a community that was growing ever more wary of and hostile toward people like him and his family.

R
ICHMOND EVIDENTLY HELD
no attraction for James Hemings. His brother had an established life there and was already in the town. It was not uncommon—indeed, it was even expected—that family members would pool their resources. In the years to come, when they had the chance, members of the Hemings family did exactly that, living together to cut down on expenses, taking in relatives, helping to secure loans for one another, and buying one another’s freedom. The brothers may, in fact, have supported each other in ways that cannot be learned from the extant record. We cannot know the conversations the two had about what they planned to do in life after they were freed. Did one brother ever try to persuade the other of the benefits of life in the places where they chose to settle? On the other hand, one cannot assume that, because they were brothers, they necessarily got along well enough to live with, or close to, each other when they did not have to.

Given his life to date, Philadelphia made sense for James Hemings in a way that Richmond did not. More cosmopolitan than Robert, and with no known wife or children, he had a greater desire, and capacity, to test the outer limits of freedom. He was picking up where he had left off in 1794 in a place that he knew well from having lived there for three years. With any luck, any of his Philadelphia contacts would still be in the city and could be sources of aid and support—just what many others in his position were seeking. There was also Benjamin Rush, Jefferson’s friend, who had enjoyed many of Hemings’s meals and had a well-established record of aiding blacks independent of their association with any of his white friends. Hemings probably had a better basis for approaching Rush than any of the other free blacks who sought the doctor’s help. The city was still considered a “refuge” for newly emancipated blacks and for fugitive slaves alike, with its small but growing middling class who through churches and civic organizations did what they could to help other members of their race. There was another group of likely interest to Hemings whose numbers had grown since he had left the city: French-speaking blacks—a few free, and the much larger number of enslaved people who were brought along with white refugees from Saint Domingue. Hemings would have known people like them when he was in Paris, and he, unlike other American blacks, would at least have had the chance to communicate with them in their native language, which many of them sought to preserve as long as they could.
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Whether the presence of this Francophone group, forced travelers as most of them were, provided the spark, or whether it was just his own wanderlust, Hemings did not stay in Philadelphia long; instead, he embarked upon a period of travel apparently within the United States and overseas. Again, we know this because of Jefferson. As it turned out, of course, Jefferson did not stay retired. He became vice-president of the United States to President John Adams in 1796. The office carried him back to Philadelphia, where he took up residence (as infrequently as decency would allow) after his election. In May of 1797 he wrote to his daughter Maria, “James is returned to this place, and is not given up to drink as I had before been informed. He tells me his next trip will be to Spain. I am afraid his journeys will end in the moon. I have endeavored to persuade him to stay where he is and lay up money.”
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Along with the completely delicious irony of seeing Jefferson tell another person to save money, this passage presents a fascinating look into James Hemings’s state of mind in the aftermath of his emancipation. In the immediate post–Civil War period, whites, sometimes with disdain, commented upon the former slaves’ seeming love of travel. People who had been forcibly detained on plantations, in servant quarters in urban areas, wanted to go. Freedom meant movement. Now many of these people, as whites probably did not think about or choose to acknowledge, were seeking to reconstitute families shattered during slavery. They were traveling to search for loved ones who had been sold away from them, often to distant parts of the country.

James Hemings knew where his relatives were, and they were not in Paris, his probable first destination after Philadelphia, nor were they in Spain. He was looking for something else—perhaps no more than any other person who wants to see the world and has the chance, though Jefferson’s report indicates that he was particularly restless. Jefferson’s endeavor to keep him in one place grew out of his own deep attachments—to familiar place, things, and people. Perhaps he and the younger man simply had different personalities. Hemings, with no wife and family to keep him in one place, seems to have preferred adventure and variety over stability and comforting familiarity.

Then there is the question of Hemings’s drinking. Chefs in the eighteenth century were notorious drinkers. There is, however, no way to know whether Hemings was really an alcoholic at this point, for not all who drink, or even all who drink to excess at times, fit that category. The drastic report of his having giving himself up to drink apparently came from someone who knew Jefferson well enough to know that he would be interested in a report on Hemings’s condition—Henrietta Gardiner, perhaps, or Benjamin Rush, who long had an interest in the causes and effects of alcoholism. Whether his characterization of the report on Hemings was one of his customary exaggerations, or whether it was the person who had relayed the information who was exaggerating, the meeting with Hemings reassured Jefferson. He was apparently not there when Jefferson first arrived in Philadelphia, or else Jefferson would not have had to rely upon others to give him information about his former servant. Like his brother Robert, James Hemings still felt some vestigial connection to Jefferson. It is telling that when he returned to Philadelphia from his travels, evidently just long enough to start out again, he spent time with the man who had owned him, and still owned the rest of his family, save for Robert Hemings. That was a reality that he could not travel far enough to escape.

The First Son

When Jefferson returned to Philadelphia in 1797 to take office as vice-president, he was intent upon spending as little time in the city as he could. And the lightness of his duties in that office enabled him to follow his plan. So unlike his sojourn in the city when he was secretary of state, this stay saw him make no substantial investment in his living quarters. There was no beautiful house with a French chef and maître d’hôtel, only rooms in John Francis’s hotel. Henrietta Gardner once again served as his laundress, and he made do during his entire tenure in office with only one manservant at a time. Not long after he left Monticello in February of 1797 to take the oath of office, he received word from his daughter Martha that “poor little Harriot,” his child with Sally Hemings, had died at the age of two.
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Hemings, now twenty-four years old, was once again childless.

Hemings was not to be childless long. Jefferson came home on July 11, 1797, and thirty-eight weeks after he arrived, Beverley, his first son who would live to adulthood, was born.
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Although Jefferson never used the full name William Beverley in his writings, the evidence indicates that Beverley Hemings’s first name was William. It was a convention of the day among many whites and blacks to refer to individuals by their middle names instead of their first names. John Wayles Eppes was known as Jack when he was a boy, but when he became an adult Jefferson sometimes referred to him as Wayles. Similarly, John Wayles Hemings, the son of Eston and Julia Hemings, was known as Wayles Hemings instead of John. Beverley’s younger brother Madison, called Jim-Mad by family members, apparently reproduced the names of his first nuclear family in his own children. He did not mention the name of his first son, who died as an infant. His next child was named Sarah after his mother. There followed among his nine children James Madison, Harriet, Thomas Eston, and William Beverley.
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Here was a further forgone opportunity for Sally Hemings to give one of her children a name from her own family. There was another William Beverley on the periphery of her world, the nine-year-old son of Thomas Mann Randolph’s sister Mary. His name, however, came from his father David Meade Randolph’s side of the family. David and Mary certainly visited Monticello. But Mary was a married woman by the time of the family conflicts with her father’s teenage bride, Gabriella Harvie, in the 1790s that drove her sisters, Anne (Nancy), Harriet, Jane, and Virginia, away from Tuckahoe—Nancy to Bizarre, Harriet, Jane, and Virginia to Varina and Monticello. Sally Hemings certainly knew of David and Mary Randolph and their children.
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There is no reason to believe that she would have preferred naming her baby after their child instead of any one of her own brothers. Naming this boy Beverley was far more likely Jefferson’s idea, and he had a good reason for it.

William Beverley was actually the name of an important man in Virginia history. The son of the historian Robert Beverley, he was a distant kinsman of Jefferson’s through his mother’s side, but that is not how Jefferson knew of him. Beverley was the well-known representative of the very wealthy, very land-rich Lord Fairfax, the only resident peer in Virginia during the mid-1700s. Fairfax had been granted a substantial amount of land in the colony, the so-called Northern Neck of Virginia. After disputes arose about the exact boundaries of Fairfax’s property, the peer and the crown agreed to appoint a commission to do a survey. Each side would have commissioners and surveyors to represent its interests. William Beverley was one of the commissioners representing Fairfax’s interests. These men, in turn, chose surveyors for what would be a grand expedition. Jefferson’s father, Peter, was chosen as one of the surveyors for the crown, along with his great friend Joshua Fry, with whom he would later create the famous Fry-Jefferson map. At the end of the journey, the representatives returned to Tuckahoe, where the almost four-year-old Thomas Jefferson, his mother, and his sisters were waiting. Marking the Fairfax line was one of several epic adventures that spawned tales that Peter Jefferson told his son Thomas, who in turn passed them on, in vivid detail, to his grandchildren.
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Two years before marking the Fairfax line, Beverley had made history in another way. He and Thomas Lee were the commissioners from Virginia who, with commissioners from Maryland, negotiated the famous Treaty of Lancaster in which the Six Nations of the Iroquois deeded to Virginia all of the land that comprises what is now West Virginia. Actually, the Virginians claimed the deal covered much more territory—all the land extending to the Mississippi River. That was not the Indians’ understanding of what they had sold, and a subsequent treaty, the Treaty of Logstown, was needed to clarify matters that could never really be clarified, given the white settlers’ ultimate goal. Jefferson saw the Treaty of Lancaster, marked prominently on his father’s map, as pivotal to Virginia’s development and to western expansion in general. He had his own copy of the treaty, was intimately familiar with its contents, and told anecdotes in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
about events that had taken place during the negotiations. He listed the treaty at the end of the book as one of the critical documents that one had to know in order to understand Virginia history. William Beverley was also the proprietor of Beverley Manor, a section of land very near to, if not actually a part of, the land subject to the Treaty of Lancaster. It, too, is marked on the Fry-Jefferson map. Jefferson had one other reason to associate the name Beverley with his father. Peter Jefferson had left his eldest son four lots in a settlement called Beverley Town, which he had surveyed and laid out in 1756.
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