The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (88 page)

The Randolphs’ final settlement at Monticello has been portrayed either as the natural coming together of a happy family under the benevolent authority of the patriarch or as a sinister outcome engineered by a manipulative Jefferson. It was neither. This was, instead, the end result of a slow-motion, across two decades, catastrophic failure. Martha and her children would never have been back at Monticello if Thomas Mann Randolph had been successful and stable and if her marriage had been happy. It is doubtful that Martha and her children would have spent months out of the year there even before this final move, if the family had been in happy circumstances. As discussed in chapter 20, there was, from the very beginning, good reason to think the union between Martha and Tom might not succeed, and the ensuing years simply bore that out.

A Thomas Mann Randolph, in a strong financial position, could more easily have resisted this public display of the failure of his marriage and his inadequacies as a provider. Even if Martha had been unhappy in marriage, and had wanted to escape it by choosing to be the housekeeper to her father, instead of wife to her husband, she would not have been able to involve her children in this unless Tom had consented. On that point the law was clear: children belonged to their fathers. If Tom had been a wealthy patriarch, there would have been no reason for the Randolph offspring to be anywhere other than under his roof.

As things stood Jefferson had become the sole financial support for his daughter’s family, a precarious situation that seems to have humiliated his son-in-law and left him few avenues to make demands regarding his family. This, however, was not Jefferson’s fault. He did not make Tom Randolph unsuccessful. Nor did he cause the younger man’s apparent mental instability and tendency toward aggression, circumstances that had to have shaped the family’s view of him. It is often noted that Jefferson adamantly opposed his son-in-law’s plan to start over by moving his family farther south. He doubtless wanted to keep his daughter and grandchildren close to him, a not unusual desire. But if he, like others, harbored doubts about Randolph’s overall mental health, it is easy to understand why he would have been anxious about having his daughter go too far out of his sight, or the potential range of his help.

What this meant to Sally Hemings and her children is clear. With Jefferson in retirement and in the daily company of Martha (the most important person in the world to him) and her offspring, there was little chance that he could treat his children with Hemings fully as his own. Martha’s status as the mistress of Monticello surely made things more awkward for Hemings and Jefferson at times, but it posed no fundamental challenge to their identity as lovers. Martha had no basis for competing with Sally Hemings in that realm.

The Hemings children and Jefferson’s grandchildren, however, bore a different relationship to one another. This was, in modern parlance, a zero-sum game. Whatever Jefferson did for Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston would come out of whatever he was supposed to be doing for his legal white grandchildren. To raise the Hemings children up was to lower the Randolph grandchildren, and Maria’s son, Francis Eppes, as well. What would these children think if they saw their grandfather tousle Madison Hemings’s hair or put his arm affectionately around his daughter Harriet? She, in particular, posed a problem. Jefferson already had a daughter and numerous granddaughters. Although they had the satisfaction of being of a superior social class and, in their biased view, a superior racial stock, Harriet Hemings had a basic advantage in the one area where women the world over are encouraged to compete: she was, in the words of one observer, “very beautiful” and, in another’s, “very handsome.”
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Jefferson’s eldest granddaughter was thought attractive, but her mother, Martha, was variously described as plain or even homely. Jefferson’s daughter and granddaughters may have looked down upon Harriet, but the sense of competitiveness about appearance is a great leveler, even if not expressed openly. As Deborah Gray White and others have shown, despite their more important social status and greater power, white plantation mistresses were often jealous of enslaved women who were as attractive as, or more attractive than, they. Indeed, Jefferson had to be especially careful in how he treated Harriett, when his daughter and his granddaughters were about.

Jefferson had another important reason to be on special guard. While his affair with Hemings certainly helped keep Martha free of a stepmother and legitimate half siblings, the kind of people who could have been rivals for his unfettered affection and property, his eldest daughter had suffered greatly because of the way the world viewed his personal life.
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The public exposure during his presidency, at the exact moment when the eyes of the world were upon him, went far beyond anything any of them could have expected to have to endure when Martha first had to accommodate herself to her father’s life. Her precipitate marriage in 1790 brought the hope of a future with the new man in her life and offered the promise of emotional refuge. During the following nearly two decades, that bright future withered and the refuge crumbled. She returned, not even as a widow, to the home of her girlhood. The two most important men in her own life, her father and husband, each in his own way, had made her life difficult. Though he would not send Hemings away, as Jefferson’s grandson said Martha wanted him to, Jefferson would not repay her forbearance with a final indignity: treating the enslaved mixed-race children of his affair as if they were the same as her free white ones. If Maria Jefferson Eppes had taken second place in her father’s affections, Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings could never have expected their father to place their interests above those of Martha Randolph and her offspring. Their hopes for true and deep family connections within the context of a nuclear family lay in their expectations for the future their mother and father had planned for them.

W
HILE
J
EFFERSON MAY
have left public life, the public life never really left him. A virtual horde of visitors began to descend on the mountain almost as soon as he came home in March of 1809—nineteen years after he left home on a similar March day to begin his political career in 1790. The flow of people did not cease until his death in 1826. They came from all over—strangers, friends, and family—to catch a glimpse or be in the presence of the lion in winter. Some were quite bold about this, peering through the windowpanes at Monticello, watching him as he went about his life, as if he were, indeed, the main attraction at the zoo. A large number wanted more than just a glimpse. They came to stay at Monticello as complete households—parents with children and, sometimes, servants in tow, relying on Jefferson’s radical hospitality.

It seems clear that many of these people simply wanted to tour the beautiful Virginia countryside, see Jefferson’s much talked-about home and its famous resident while, in Jefferson’s overseer Edmund Bacon’s words, saving themselves “a tavern bill.”
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Martha Randolph had that sense as well. Jefferson, however, preferred to see the attention as a token of his countrymen’s esteem and turned aside suggestions that he find ways to discourage the aggressive visitations. His openhanded nature and hatred of direct confrontation prevented him from doing anything that approached being openly inhospitable, though the deluge of visitors added greatly to his already strained finances. All of them, along with whatever horses they brought, were put up and fed at his expense. Some even stayed for weeks at a time. Once, he roundly scolded Bacon after discovering that his frugal overseer was rationing the feed for his guests’ horses as a cost-saving measure. He made him restore full portions.
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It was not just the money that caused tension in Jefferson’s retirement household. Martha Randolph and her daughters resented the constant presence of company. The enslaved laborers no doubt resented them as well. Although Monticello did not legally belong to them, some, like Betty Brown, had spent far more actual time there than Jefferson. The mountain was theirs in a way that mattered greatly. They had created a community born of years of shared experiences and dependence upon one another—and now here came another set of masters and mistresses to get used to for however long they chose to stay. This community had ample reason to feel besieged by the multitude of demanding strangers interrupting daily routines and expectations.

While these visitors would have had no great effect on the daily lives of the enslaved agricultural workers at Monticello, Edith Fossett, Joseph Fossett’s wife, whose cooking so impressed Jefferson’s visitors, was no doubt the most sorely tasked. She had to prepare multiple meals a day for these people, and do it at a consistently high level. But Fossett was probably not the one who had to make the greatest adjustments. What she was now doing at Monticello was a continuation of her job at the President’s House, held for almost eight years. She was used to hard and constant work. And as the cook, she had a measure of control over her activities, working within a rather defined set of parameters. Because she approached artistry in her work, Fossett surely liked cooking and could have the occasional sense of satisfaction of having achieved perfection and the benefit of compliments for having done so.
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Although she is often referred to as Jefferson’s “cook,” that title really does not do justice to Fossett’s training and experiences, for she, just like James Hemings, was trained for years by a real French chef.

It was the other household servants—the Hemings women and their children—who saw the biggest increase in their daily responsibilities, with fewer possibilities for psychological rewards. Changing linen, making beds, and lighting fires for guests, though less labor-intensive than cooking—left less room for creativity and love of craft than being a chef or a cook. By every measure, the end of Jefferson’s formal employment actually marked the start of a new era of drudgery for those who worked in the house. His long absences during his almost two decades of public service after he returned from France left Sally Hemings and her female relatives with little to do when he was away. The men, artisans, always had work—whether Jefferson was there or not. With his daughters returning to their homes when he went back to Washington, and no reason for many visitors to come to the mountain when the center of attention was away, the Hemings women were idle during Jefferson’s presidency. Indeed, it is hard to imagine just how these women occupied themselves during the many months when there were no daily household duties to perform.

Because her “formal” employment focused on taking care of Jefferson’s chambers, Sally Hemings’s work routine necessarily became steadier when he returned permanently to the mountain. It is not likely, though, that she personally attended visitors to Monticello. Even before the name Sally became linked with “Jefferson,” and it would have been imprudent to have her interact with curious and likely-to-gossip strangers, her female relatives and their children are the ones who appear in the record as performing the tasks of domestic service. She had ceased being connected to Martha after their return from France, and Martha had a personal maid and complement of enslaved people from her own plantation, Edgehill.

Besides what her son Madison said she did, and the description from a newspaper account in the early 1800s that correctly pegged her as a seamstress for the family, Hemings did help her sisters bottle cider when the season arrived. Neither of those tasks would have required much contact with guests. We know that Hemings’s female relatives, like all the other adults at Monticello, kept gardens or raised animals because all of them sold produce or chickens and eggs to the Jefferson family. Hemings did not enter the market with the Jeffersons. Whether she spent any of her time gardening is thus unclear. Her son Beverley, showing an early sign of the entrepreneur at age eight, did sell three quarts of strawberries to the household in 1806.
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It seems improbable that the youngster planted the fruit himself, so he likely gathered them wild or had been given a section of a family member’s garden to call his own. Many later years, after he had left Monticello to begin life as a white man, his teenage brothers, Madison and Eston, would sell to their father cabbages they had grown.

Sally Hemings evidently spent most of her time during Jefferson’s retirement years looking after her children—seeing them through childhood illnesses and helping them prepare to become adults. This African American enslaved mother was in a singular circumstance. She had children who would not be slaves once they reached adulthood. They might not even live as African Americans. Hemings’s task was probably not so much about how her children would speak or carry themselves, for there is little reason to believe her speech and presentation were all that different from what theirs turned out to be. As noted earlier, antebellum and postbellum writers and commentators grossly exaggerated the distance between the speech patterns of black and white southerners, in their determination to enforce, even on the written page, a supposed uniform norm of essential racial differences. Hemings had had ample time and occasion to know the ways of whites and, in her case, a particular type of white person to serve as models of behavior for her children. In his late-in-life recollections of Monticello, her great-nephew Peter Fossett spoke with extreme condescension about some of the whites he encountered after leaving Monticello. In his eyes, they were merely crude people, who knew nothing of the rules of etiquette he had learned through his observations of life at Monticello.
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Sally Hemings, of course, had seen much more of that type of world than her great-nephew. There is no way to know whether she was as snobbish as he about this sort of thing, but she certainly had the opportunity to be.

Hemings, like other mothers of girls, would have spent considerable time teaching her daughter, Harriet, to sew and mend clothing while doing a great deal of that herself. Harriet learned spinning along with the other enslaved girls, probably under the direction of her aunt Nancy, who had been brought back to Monticello in the 1790s for the express purpose of starting Jefferson’s small textile operation. Sewing, spinning, and weaving were staple signifiers of feminine virtue, made even more important by the embargo and War of 1812, which disrupted the country’s trade with Europe. As it had been just before the American Revolution, homespun became a potent symbol of American self-sufficiency and independence from foreign goods. While his daughter was learning to spin and weave, Jefferson was extolling the virtues of homespun to correspondents like John Adams, at the very beginning of their famous rapprochement in 1811. He praised it as an important example of the “economy and thriftiness” of America’s “household manufactures.”
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Although Sally Hemings was likely the primary influence in the life of her daughter, an important masculine influence began to shape their daily lives once her sons—Beverley, Madison, and Eston—reached the age of twelve or so. They were put under the direction of her brother John, who undoubtedly ended up being something of a surrogate father to them. Though their mother continued to have an important role in their lives, their apprenticeships to their uncle marked the beginning of their transition into manhood. Hemings and his wife, Priscilla, were extremely devoted to one another and, as far as the record shows, had no children of their own. So Jefferson’s decision to put his sons in the daily care and under the tutelage of their uncle was not only a sound practical move; it served an important affective goal as well. Standing in Jefferson’s place, the much respected carpenter and joiner could be the father they could not have, and they could be like sons to Hemings.

The Monticello joinery was an active place, where John Hemings and his assistants made desks, chairs, and tables, often from Jefferson’s designs and from his own inspiration. When Jefferson saw items he liked, such as the Campeche or “siesta” chair for lounging made popular in New Orleans in the early 1800s, he turned to Hemings. Jefferson had wanted a Campeche chair for many years, but was unable to obtain one until 1818. Even before the chair arrived, he described it to Hemings, who made his own version. When the much sought-after object arrived at Monticello, Hemings made at least two more after studying the genuine article. Given whom he worked for, Hemings had to be extremely versatile. In 1814, when the seventy-one-year-old Jefferson grew tired of making his thrice-a-year visits to Poplar Forest on horseback, he drew up plans for a landau, a coach that could seat at least four people. Hemings built the vehicle’s body, Joseph Fossett did the necessary iron work, and Burwell Colbert painted it. The vehicle was a source of great pride to Jefferson—and the men who actually worked on it probably felt the same way. Others were less than impressed with a design that seems to have owed a bit too much to Jeffersonian quirkiness.
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Perhaps Hemings’s grandest achievement, however, was one that did not survive long at all. In 1825 he made a desk for Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen, who had married Joseph Coolidge and moved to Boston. His great time and effort ultimately came to nothing, for the desk was lost at sea on its way to her. Hemings wept at the news. Jefferson reported his utter devastation to Ellen. Hemings had apparently seen the desk as his masterpiece, and Jefferson said that he was as torn apart by the loss as Vergil would have been had his
Aeneid
perished in a fire.
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Hemings occupied important space in the lives of Jefferson and his family. Like his nephew Burwell Colbert, he received an annual gratuity and was allowed to have a line of credit at the local store to purchase his own clothing.
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There was no artisan on the plantation Jefferson respected more, or with whom he worked more closely. About a dozen letters of their correspondence to one another survive, indicating the importance they attached to keeping in contact. The two must have been an interesting sight in conversation—Jefferson, who was six feet two and a half inches tall, and Hemings, who stood just under five feet six inches. As an amateur woodworker himself, Jefferson approached his discussions with Hemings from a more personal vantage point than if he had been less interested in the process of woodworking and building. The two men talked about the work Hemings did for Jefferson, and they very likely discussed whatever items Jefferson worked on himself.

The connection between Hemings and Jefferson spilled over into their immediate families. Jefferson’s younger grandchildren, in particular, were close to Hemings, calling him “Daddy” and his wife, Priscilla, who was their nurse, “Mammy.” Priscilla Hemings, who, like her husband, was religiously devout, traveled to the President’s House to care for the Randolph children when Martha Randolph visited her father there. Edmund Bacon remembered that she had complete charge of the young Randolphs and said that “if there was any switching to be done, she always did it.”
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This was a time when corporal punishment of children was generally expected, and this enslaved woman was allowed, probably directed, to spank Jefferson’s grandchildren when they fell outside of the basic norms of behavior that small children of all races were expected to observe.

The Randolph children, whose father was at various times estranged from the family, may have been in special need of male attention from someone younger than their grandfather. Although Jefferson was known for his attentiveness to them, as Madison Hemings remembered, he spent an enormous amount of time during his retirement in his study, reading the countless letters he received, replying to many of them, and initiating his own correspondence.
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In addition to whatever plantation matters he had to deal with and note in his Farm and Garden Books—along with attending to visitors—this was also Jefferson’s time for planning and building the University of Virginia. He simply did not spend as much of his day romping with his grandchildren as some memories of Monticello might indicate. When they were not in school, the joiner’s shop at Monticello was a favorite place for some of the younger Randolphs. They pestered Hemings to make things for them, requests he sometimes turned aside for a while, reminding them that his primary duty was to their grandfather. Hemings had a clear internal sense of the nature and extent of that duty, mentioning to one of the Randolph children that he was saving a large stock of wood to make Jefferson’s coffin, an act that he did eventually perform.
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