The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (82 page)

Colbert was thirteen when Jefferson became vice-president, seventeen when he became president, and Jefferson had already singled him out as a special favorite. Although he worked in the nailery, he was not indispensable there, and certainly could have attended Jefferson in Philadelphia and Washington. In the 1770s his uncle Robert at age twelve was following Jefferson around on horseback and acting as his manservant. In the 1780s it was sometimes the teenage James Hemings. John Freeman, the man Jefferson hired to fill a role that Colbert could have played at the President’s House—that of footman, waiter, and traveling attendant to Jefferson—was only three years older than Colbert and did not have the advantage of long acquaintance with Jefferson. Ironically enough, Freeman became a member of the Hemings family through his marriage to Colbert’s sister Melinda.
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Bringing Colbert to Washington would not have been a case of taking a person who had no knowledge of service and putting him out of his league. Colbert, his brother, and cousins also worked in the house at Monticello and knew what it meant to serve there. By the mid-1800s Colbert had experience as a painter and glazer, but there is no indication that he was allowed to leave Monticello and ply his trade for others during the months that Jefferson was away. Instead, Jefferson told his overseer to give him spending money whenever he asked. This was the difference between treating a person as an adult versus treating him as a child, which, after all, is what paternalism is about.

It appears that Jefferson did not want his particular “favored” slaves to see and get used to the outside world. Just as he did not want “city negroes” at Monticello, at a certain point he no longer wanted his favorite Monticello “negroes” to go to the city. This was particularly true of Colbert, whose presence in Washington would have made the most sense. After all, what had been Jefferson’s experiences with the young man’s uncles? The end result of their autonomy and forays in the world at large was that each of them grew restless in his service and anxious to end his formal association with him. When they wanted to leave, he was not emotionally prepared to thwart them, though he easily could have. So he avoided this possible “bad” scenario by leaving the person who most reasonably could have played a role in Washington at home and making him stay there.

The only other enslaved people Jefferson brought from the mountain to live and work in the President’s House were teenage girls, all of them to be trained as cooks. The first, Ursula, who joined the Hemings family when she became the wife of Wormley Hughes, was a member of another important family at Monticello with ties all the way back to Jefferson’s wife. She was the granddaughter of George and Ursula Granger, the “King” and “Queen” of Monticello and the niece of Isaac of the famed memoir and photograph. George Granger was the only black man to serve as an overseer at Monticello, and his wife, Ursula, had been the head cook before the Hemings brothers took over the position in the days after Jefferson returned from Paris. Ursula, it will be remembered, served as a wet nurse for Jefferson’s eldest daughter when her mother was unable to produce enough milk for her and the Jeffersons feared the infant might die. Ursula’s “good breast of milk,” as Jefferson put it, saved her life.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Granger family faced its own catastrophe. George and Ursula, and their eldest son, George Jr., all died in less than a twelve-month period in 1799 and 1800. After falling ill, each consulted a black doctor in a nearby county who gave them medicine that the Jefferson family believed poisoned them. Jupiter Evans, who also died in 1800, had consulted the same doctor, who, in Martha Randolph’s words, “absconded” after learning of Evans’s death.
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Given her family history, and the still fresh tragedy that must have devastated her, the remaining members of the Granger family, and the other members of the enslaved community at Monticello, Jefferson’s idea to have the fourteen-year-old Ursula Granger come to Washington and train to be Monticello’s new cook, like her grandmother and namesake before her, appears a sentimental choice.

Jefferson’s plan did not work. Ursula lasted less than a year. She was actually a few months pregnant when she came to the President’s House, a fact no doubt unknown to Jefferson when he decided to bring her to Washington. Indeed, Ursula’s child, not Martha Jefferson Randolph’s son James, was the first child born in the President’s House.
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Being pregnant, and a first-time mother with an infant, was not the best way to begin an apprenticeship to a French chef. She apparently did not fare well as a cook trainee and went home to resume life as an agricultural worker, and to have nine more children with her husband, Wormely Hughes. Her efforts in Washington were not totally lost, because she often helped out in the kitchen when she was not in the fields. Edith Fossett and Frances Hern were her replacements, and these “two good girls” as Jefferson’s maître d’hôtel at the President’s House, Etienne Lemaire, called them, succeeded where Ursula apparently failed. In fact, Fossett became the head of the kitchen at Monticello when Jefferson retired from politics in 1809, Peter Hemings having moved on to other trades, including that of a brewer. It was Fossett’s cooking that visitors to Monticello like Margaret Thornton and Daniel Webster would extol in the years to come.

With his very traditional views about the natures of men and women, Jefferson probably saw these teenage girls as less likely to cause problems than teenage males, at least not the kind that would make them grow restless and want to go out into the world. All of them had ties to men at Monticello that they might not have wanted to break. It is true that Sally Hemings, a teenager, had rebelled temporarily in France, but her situation in Paris was quite different from that of Ursula’s, Edith’s, and Frances’s in Washington. The nation’s capital had no law that provided an easy avenue to freedom, no revolution was brewing just outside the walls of the President’s House, and the three teenagers in Washington had no older brother there helping them think they could build a life away from Jefferson.

The presence of Hughes, Fossett, and Hern may have fueled the rumor that Jefferson kept a “stable of mulatto slave girls”
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at the President’s House, and had an African harem, for his sexual pleasure. We do not know about Ursula Granger’s mother, but, as noted earlier, the Grangers were not mixed race, and we have no reason to believe that Ursula would have been thought of as a “mulatto.” Precision, however, was not the point of these exercises, or perhaps Ursula represented the “African” part of the contingent. Some of Edith Fossett’s children passed for white, so she was likely fair-skinned, as was her husband, Joseph. The members of Frances Hern’s family, the Gillettes, were also described as mixed race.

Whatever these young ladies’ skin color, President Jefferson lived under a cloud of suspicion about his relations with African American women. Because many whites saw engaging in interracial sex as something akin to a malady or an indelible character flaw, having sex with black women would be a recurring event for him, a terrible and mighty thing beyond his control. After the Hemings revelations, Jefferson, they said, was
the kind
of person who would do
something like that
. This racist formulation cast any African American woman in his vicinity as his likely mistress, with no consideration of how that might have distorted the lives of the women involved. If these women had children, they belonged to him. The great irony, of course, is that just as Jefferson moved to make the Hemingses strictly a part of his private world, his return to the public domain forced his private life with one family member out into the open.

“His Mechanics”

As the locus of Jefferson’s relations with the Hemingses shifted strictly to Monticello, John Hemings and Joseph Fossett—son and grandson, respectively, to Elizabeth Hemings—became the family’s new face at Monticello at the turn of the nineteenth century. Unlike their older relatives, these two young men, particularly Hemings, grew close to Jefferson, not as personal attendants but as craftsmen whose skills he respected. They began to come into their own in their separate fields during Jefferson’s presidency—Hemings, the carpenter and joiner, and Fossett, the blacksmith and metal-worker. These two young men, from very different pathways, became the most important enslaved artisans on the mountain.

In many respects, the less well-known Joseph Fossett’s progress through life is the more poignant, for the theme of separation from family permeated the line of his mother, Mary Hemings, throughout their time at Monticello and afterward. Their experiences show starkly how tenuous the Hemingses’ “privileges” really were. Fossett’s elder brother and sister, Daniel and Molly, had been given as wedding presents in 1787 and 1790 when young Joseph, born in November 1780, was seven and then ten.
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We most typically think of the pain of the mother and child separated, but enslaved children suffered, too, when their brothers and sisters were taken from them. While children of all races and classes lived with the loss of siblings through death, young Joseph and his enslaved cohort knew they could lose their family members through the normal operations of the systems of slavery and property.

When Daniel and Molly were taken, Joseph was old enough to know, and presumably miss, his older brother and sister. If fears of death brought nightmares to all young children who buried siblings, Joseph Fossett, at seven and ten, could lie in bed at night and fear that his time to be given away might come. Although Molly had served as Martha Randolph’s maid from around 1790, and probably came to Monticello when Martha visited, Daniel, whose last name was Farley, was farther away in Louisa County with Jefferson’s sister Anna Scott Marks. The removal of Daniel and Molly from Joseph Fossett’s daily life provided a harsh first lesson regarding his family’s true position in the world. Jefferson often spoke of the transfers of enslaved people between and among his white relatives as keeping slaves “in the family,” as if that mitigated the harshness of family breakups. Whatever he felt he had to tell himself in these situations, one seriously doubts that Mary Hemings and her children really considered Anna and Hastings Marks, or Martha and Tom Randolph, as members of
their
family.

Around the same time his brother was given away, Joseph, along with his sisters Molly and Betsy, went to live in the home of Thomas Bell, who had leased their mother while Jefferson was in Paris. Two years after Molly was given to Martha Randolph, Joseph faced another loss when Bell bought his mother and the two children she had borne him during the time of the lease. Mary Hemings was forced to choose between the possibility of freedom for herself and her two youngest children and living in bondage with all four of the children left to her. She decided, of course, to remain with Bell, perhaps calculating that this offered the best chance to rescue her other children in the future. Joseph and Betsy’s aunts and uncles almost certainly stepped in to help raise the twelve-and nine-year-olds. That was a tradition born of necessity in enslaved families, for they always lived with the reality of separation and had to have ways of taking care of their own. It appears that these early and recurrent reminders of the fragility of family bonds in slavery, rather than breaking his sense of family, made Joseph Fossett more determined to keep his family together. As things turned out, he would need every ounce of that determination in the years to come.

Fossett was twenty when Jefferson became president. One of the original nail boys in the Monticello plantation factory, he distinguished himself for his efficiency in churning out product for Jefferson. Like some of his other Hemings cousins in the nailery, he worked part-time in the house, a scene that united him with his sister Betsy, who had become Sally Hemings’s replacement as Maria Jefferson’s maid. The siblings lived together, for they were listed in the Farm Book in 1794, two years after they were separated from their mother, as making up their own household.
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When Betsy Hemings left the mountain in 1797, when Maria got married, Joseph, then approaching seventeen, became the last of Mary Hemings’s children to remain at Monticello.

Fossett’s skill in the nailery suggested to Jefferson that the young man had a particular talent for metalworking. He therefore put the sixteen-year-old under the training of George Granger Jr. to become a blacksmith. Within a year of Granger’s death, in 1799, Fossett became the next foreman of the nail factory. He also came under the tutelage of the extremely talented, but equally erratic, William Stewart, the blacksmith from Philadelphia who lived next door to Fossett’s grandmother Elizabeth Hemings. Jefferson hired him in 1801, and from the beginning Stewart established a reputation for weirdness. When he was on his way to Monticello to begin work, he stopped in on Jefferson’s cousin George to ask for part of his salary in advance. George wrote to Jefferson in alarm, saying that his new workman “was either very much intoxicated or, is actually a madman.” He knew nothing of what Stewart was supposed to do at Monticello, and when he tried to get the information from him, the workman was so “incoherent” that George could not figure out what he was saying.
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Stewart nevertheless had a genius for metalworking and did masterly work at Monticello and passed on his skills to Joseph Fossett, among others.

While Fossett continued at his trade, his wife, Edith, continued at the President’s House. The couple saw each other infrequently, for Jefferson typically left his trainee cooks behind when he went home to Monticello on vacations. The difficulties posed by having a long-distance marriage got to be too much for Fossett. Not long after Jefferson came home for his summer vacation in 1806 without Edith, Fossett left the mountain to go and see her. Lucia Stanton suggests that John Freeman and John (Jack) Shorter, two of Jefferson’s African American servants who had come to Monticello with him, had told Joseph something about his wife or their young son, James, that caused him to set out immediately for the capital.
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