The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (86 page)

B
EYOND THE STEADFASTNESS
of Jefferson’s attachments to those about whom he felt deeply, his life with Sally Hemings pertained to Monticello, the place where he ruled. To allow what was being said in the press to work a change in his behavior in this intensely private realm was to lose control of himself and this place. Journalists and his political enemies would be the masters of Monticello, not he—a thing he would never have countenanced. This new child offered evidence that he had not been in the least chastened by the criticism. And he could not reasonably have expected that his defiance would remain hidden, for it was clear that someone close to Monticello was giving information to the press. When one gets past the juvenile and generic “Congo harem” references, much of the information that appeared in the newspapers about Hemings and Jefferson was accurate. In the same year that Madison Hemings was born, a Boston newspaper published an article that contained detailed information about the Walker affair, and the efforts to avert a duel over it, that none but a well-connected source could have known. That same piece mentioned Beverley by name, said he was the eldest of the Hemings-Jefferson children, and mentioned that Sally Hemings was John Wayles’s daughter.
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This was not the product of random guessing. Jefferson simply kept living the way he had always lived, following his own internal compass.

Even as he was battered in the papers, Jefferson suffered an additional crushing personal loss, which brought uncomfortable personal issues to the fore. In 1806 George Wythe, his law teacher, mentor, and friend, was apparently murdered by his grandnephew George Sweeney. Wythe had been married twice, but had no children. His will left his house and other property to Lydia Broadnax, a free woman of color who was his housekeeper, and property to another former slave Benjamin, who predeceased Wythe. To Michael Brown, a fifteen-year-old African American boy who lived with him as a ward, he left bank stock with the instructions that Jefferson was to take charge of Brown’s finances and his education. Sweeney apparently coveted the property and tried to get around the provisions of the will by poisoning the beneficiaries. Broadnax survived, but Wythe and Michael Brown did not.
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A year after these events Broadnax, suffering the lingering effects of her brush with death, wrote to Jefferson, alerting him to her “distressed situation” and, with great embarrassment, asking whether he would be willing to provide her with some financial assistance. She appealed to him on the basis of their “old and intimate acquaintance” and her knowledge of Jefferson’s benevolence. Jefferson had been in Washington when the letter arrived, but he attended to her entreaty as soon as he returned home. He wrote to his agent George Jefferson, in Richmond, where Broadnax lived also, directing him to give her fifty dollars, a good sum in those days, along with other instructions about handling his affairs. Interestingly enough, when he noted his directions to George in his memorandum books, he listed the other transactions but made no mention of having told George to give Lydia Broadnax money.
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The exact nature of Michael Brown’s connection to Wythe and Broadnax is unknown. It has often been assumed that he was Wythe’s son and that Broadnax was his mother. No evidence exists to support either conclusion, however, though Wythe’s treatment of the pair was extraordinary. Whether Brown, who was described as “yellow” skinned, was his biological son or not, Wythe treated him as if he were, taking pains with his education. Certainly asking his own favorite and most famous pupil, the current president of the United States, to become Michael’s guardian shows the depth of his affection for the boy.

Once again, a member of Jefferson’s close circle had died an unnatural death, leaving him stunned. He wanted a memento of his old teacher and asked William Duval, who had informed him of Wythe’s death, if he might be sent a profile of Wythe that Broadnax owned to make a copy. Broadnax sent Jefferson the original. He expressed his sorrow that Wythe, who lingered for several days before dying, lived his final hours knowing that the young man who Jefferson knew he regarded as a son had already died. He also said how much he regretted that Michael’s tragic death “deprived [him] of an object for the attentions which would have gratified [him] unceasingly with the constant recollection & execution of the wishes of [his] friend.”
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How would Jefferson have carried out Wythe’s final request about his involvement with Michael Brown? Would he really have brought the African American boy to Monticello or to the President’s House to continue his studies, or would he have used the money from Wythe’s estate to hire tutors for him? Brown at Monticello would indeed have been an interesting and problematic sight. Had Brown lived, and Jefferson accepted his dear mentor’s charge, he would have been attending to the education of George Wythe’s African American surrogate son, even as he had mixed-race sons and a daughter of his own flesh.

By 1806 Beverley was eight years old, Harriet five, and Madison nearly two. Two years after the Wythe tragedy and the near-miss of a Jefferson/Brown pairing, the last of the Hemings children arrived, Eston, born a month after Jefferson’s sixty-fifth birthday. This was truly an occasion, for it marked the first time that Jefferson had been home for the birth of one of his four children with Hemings who survived. Eston was also the first child that Hemings bore without her mother’s presence, another likely milestone in the life of the now thirty-five-year-old woman. And, yet again, Hemings did not—or was not able to—name her child after a member of her family. This youngest son was instead named for Thomas Eston Randolph, a favorite Jefferson cousin, the son of his maternal uncle William Randolph. Born and raised in England, he had come to the United States in the 1790s, apparently holding fast to the culture of that isle. One of Jefferson’s granddaughters, long after Randolph had left the country of his birth, referred to him as that “most English of Englishmen.”
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Though Randolph was younger than Jefferson, the two men struck up a friendship that involved all the generations of the Jefferson family. In fact, Jefferson described Thomas Eston Randolph’s family and his as being “almost as one,” and that was no Jeffersonian exaggeration. Randolph married Thomas Mann Randolph’s younger sister, Jane, who was also very close to Maria Jefferson. The couple had their own son named Eston and a daughter Harriet, born the year after Jefferson and Hemings’s daughter Harriet. That Harriet would grow up to marry Maria Jefferson Eppes’s son, Francis. Randolph and Jefferson went through some rocky periods in later years, as often happens when friendship and family get mixed with business, but their tie was never really broken. Indeed, in Jefferson’s final days, Thomas Eston Randolph, with great emotion and sensitivity, volunteered to sit up at night with his dying cousin and friend.
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The names of the Hemings children brought them into these convoluted Jefferson/Randolph/Eppes family connections, but not on the basis of equality. They certainly knew they carried the names of people important to their father and had some thoughts on what this meant. But like most enslaved children in their position, the times and their circumstances gave them ample reason to be realistic about all that this did not mean. Their father, an Anglo-American man of the eighteenth century, with a legitimate white child and grandchildren, was going to go with them only so far down the road.

The Hemings children’s older cousins Robert and Sally Bell had been in a completely different position. They had no competition, because their father, Thomas Bell, was apparently without any known white children, legitimate or otherwise. We will never know, but one wonders whether a Thomas Bell with white children would have taken property from them (which is what sharing entails) and given it to his mixed-raced enslaved children and his mistress. He certainly would not have been able to do that without formally freeing Mary Hemings, Robert, and Sally and making them eligible to receive his property. He was able to get away with informally freeing them and relying on his relatives, the law’s deference to his expressed will, and his community’s acquiescence to see things through. If he had had legitimate white children, that would have been next to impossible.

Madison Hemings remembered that his father, elderly even by today’s standards, was kind to him, his brothers, and his sister, as he was to everyone. He was “not in the habit,” however, of showing his younger children “partiality or fatherly affection.” He also mentioned that Jefferson’s grandchildren taught him to read and write, implying that Jefferson took no interest in his formal education.
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Hemings’s statement is often transformed into saying that Jefferson
never
showed any partiality or fatherly affection to him and his siblings. That cannot have been what Hemings meant, at least not regarding partiality, for he also detailed many of the ways that he and his siblings’ lives were different from others’ on the plantation, differences that were direct products of Jefferson’s decisions. Hemings may have wanted more from his father, but these decisions clearly showed that Jefferson favored his children with Hemings over other enslaved children on the plantation.

Hemings revealed what he meant by “fatherly affection” when he offered, by way of comparison, Jefferson’s treatment of his grandchildren toward whom he was “affectionate.” Jefferson was well known for his attentiveness to his grandchildren, playing games with them and, like many grandparents, being more indulgent with them than he had been with his daughters when they were young. We get a sense from Madison Hemings that Jefferson rarely played with or cuddled his youngest children, things that the young boy Madison noticed and perhaps longed for. Very tellingly, his point of reference for Jefferson’s shows of fatherly affection was not his half sister Martha. Instead, Hemings compared himself to Jefferson’s grandchildren, who were around his same age.
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Imagine a six-year-old with a father who is always kind to him, but who seems to ration his affectionate gestures, viewing that same father freely expressing his affection for his grandchildren who were around the six-year-old’s age. This scene, almost unfathomable to the modern American mind, has been played out countless times in feudal and slave societies the world over—biological children living within the eye-shot and touch of fathers from whom they were separated by class, race, or legal status. All three of these factors distanced the Hemings children from Jefferson. These four individuals had to forge, very early on, singular identities as they lived in what could only be characterized as a form of limbo.

Madison Hemings suggested what that identity was when he said that he and his siblings were “measurably happy” during their childhoods because they grew up free from the “dread” of being enslaved all their lives.
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Their knowledge of their parents’ intended future for them, and their father’s capacity to bring that future about, gave them a distinct way to see themselves. They were not truly like the others enslaved at Monticello, though their father listed them in his Farm Book and wrote of them as if they were. Here was that not infrequent case where seemingly neutral documents badly mislead. Both the Farm Book and Jefferson’s nearly rote and veiled references in his letters calling Beverley and Madison, and then Madison and Eston, John Hemings’s “two assistants” or “two apprentices”—always unnamed—hid a vital truth of their lives, and of his as well.
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The phrases “his assistants” and his “two apprentices” suggest obscurity and hint at their unimportance relative to their uncle John, when the young men buried beneath these titles were the very opposite of unimportant. They were Jefferson’s sons who were going to receive what no other enslaved people at Monticello ever received: emancipation with his blessing upon reaching adulthood so that they could live the prime of their lives as free men. Their father, for whom everything and everyone had a place, put them in the nearest compartment that fit their circumstances, knowing all along that even that would be temporary. And when the two oldest Hemings children left Monticello, he used the language of slavery in his Farm Book to describe their departure. Both Beverley and Harriet, whom Jefferson arranged to be put on a stagecoach with the equivalent of about nine hundred dollars in today’s terms, “ran away.”
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This event had been expected and planned for since the day they were born, so they had not run away in the conventional sense. This was the beginning of the fulfillment of the plan set in motion thirty-two years before in France.

So the Hemings siblings had childhood identities as a special band of people who were destined to go, to leave behind two states that were coterminous for them: childhood and slavery. Even though their father was the master of it, Monticello would never be theirs, any more than
he
could ever really be “theirs.” They grew up in anticipation, with a present connection to their father, but moving toward a future where their connection to him would live only in their memories and whatever they wanted to tell their families about him. The situation would be even more stark for those of the children who planned to go into the white world. If Beverley and Harriet had thought all along that they would live as white people when they became adults, they knew early on that their father could live only in their memories for, depending upon whom they married, it might be unwise to tell their spouses or children who Jefferson was to them.

One wonders whether Jefferson ever told Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston that by Virginia law they were white, a law that he explicated, in needlessly complicated algebraic form, in an 1813 letter to a man named Francis Gray, who had asked him about racial designations in Virginia.
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He might not have had to tell them. Their mother probably knew. Enslaved people were often familiar with some of the basics of law, especially the laws of slavery and property that related to them. Isaac Jefferson, for example, was quite precise about the source of Jefferson’s fortune, saying that Jefferson was personally wealthy primarily in knowledge; his wealth in land and slaves had come to him through his legal marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton. One did not have to be a legal scholar to know that enslaved status was determined by the status of one’s mother, or even that people who were less than one-quarter black were considered white. This was the kind of information that mixed-race slaves, and even the whites around them, would have been interested in knowing and talking about. If these children grew up thinking of themselves as legally white, their connection to racially based slavery would seem even that much more tenuous to them. Their future was not just out of slavery but out of one putative race into another.