The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (89 page)

We can see the extent of Hemings’s identification with Jefferson in an episode at Poplar Forest in 1821. During one of his extended stays at the plantation, he wrote to Jefferson about the activities of Nace, the foreman and gardener at the plantation. After noting that he did not care much for complaining, Hemings said he felt he had to say something because Nace was taking “everything out of the garden,” carrying it back to his cabin, and hiding it. When Hemings asked Nace for vegetables, he claimed that he was saving them for Jefferson. Other residents of Poplar Forest revealed Nace’s real game: he was taking the vegetables into nearby Lynchburg and selling them in the market.
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While Hemings’s act of informing on Nace at first glance appears traitorous to a member of the enslaved community, the truth is more complicated. Hemings and his nephews, who were not at Poplar Forest year-round and would not have had their own gardens, evidently got their vegetables from Jefferson’s kitchen garden. By taking all the vegetables for himself, Nace was “hurting” not just Jefferson but also Hemings, who had no access to a valuable foodstuff that Nace was appropriating for monetary gain. Hemings faced the common dilemma of members of any subordinated group within a given society. Certain individuals within the group are often willing to commit bad acts that seriously harm their fellows. They then rely upon the group members’ natural inclination to stand together in the face of oppression to keep doing whatever they are doing. Of course, the individual bad actor has no real loyalty to the community, or else he or she would never deliberately hurt one of its members. Such persons are motivated by the kind of extreme selfishness that can be found in any race, class, or other subsection of the human population. Often the oppressed community closes ranks and will continue to suffer rather than expose the bad actor to the wrath of their common oppressor—unless the problem passes some threshold of intolerability. Then they can either exact retribution themselves or have the oppressor deal with the one who is causing the problem. That is what seems to have happened with Hemings and Nace.

Nace erred by going too far. His greed adversely affected members of his own enslaved community. Had he been willing to share, there would have been no problem. The difficulty with community policing of Nace’s activities was that he was the foreman at Poplar Forest and in a position of power. The only ones “above” him were the overseer and Jefferson, the community’s oppressors. We really do not know what steps Hemings took before bringing Jefferson into the matter. His letter suggests, however, that writing to Monticello was a last, desperate resort.

E
VEN BEFORE
J
EFFERSON
left office, his life as a public man began to intrude upon his private world at Monticello, and he took what steps he could during his presidency to protect himself. The front line in the battle was his private chamber, which he guarded almost obsessively. A visitor to his home, Margaret Bayard Smith, described it as his “
sanctum sanctorum
.” It is not that no one ever went into Jefferson’s private living quarters, though he did create the strong presumption that the area was generally off-limits. Anna Maria Thornton, a visitor during his presidency, noted with great interest, and some bewilderment, that the multiple doors leading to Jefferson’s bedroom suite were always locked and that he used only one entrance himself—the door leading into the library. He did allow visitors. Thornton was eventually given a tour, and Isaac Jefferson and Edmund Bacon mentioned having conversations with Jefferson in his living area. And, of course, in the daily life of the place, Sally Hemings, Burwell Colbert, and, probably, many others were in Jefferson’s bedroom and living area for one reason or another over the five decades he lived on the mountain. Two entrances into his living quarters from the outside may have on occasion doubled as service entrances as well as a means for Jefferson to have quick access to the outdoors. These entrances also allowed his world with Sally Hemings, and perhaps even with their grandchildren, to remain resolutely separate from the world he lived in with others.
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As more strangers came to visit Monticello and wander freely about the grounds, it became clear that the very open nature of the house posed a problem. The picturesque walkway just off the south piazza next to his chambers created a bird’s-eye view into his living chambers. With the help of John Hemings, Jefferson took steps to rectify this problem during his presidency. Hemings built, and James Dinsmore also worked on, what Jefferson called “porticles”—structures attached to the exterior of his private living area. The porticles, with their louvered blinds, blocked outside views into his bedroom chamber and study and enclosed the two small private porches on the western and eastern flanks of Jefferson’s bedroom that essentially extended his living area. The porticles, or Venetian porches, as they are also known, preserved at least some of the sense of being outdoors, allowing him to look out, but preventing those outside from seeing in.
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Jefferson never said why he built them and, in the process, destroyed the perfect geometric symmetry of Monticello’s Palladian design. There are no porticles on the north side of Monticello. Indeed, later owners of Monticello thought them ugly and tore them down, but they have since been restored. It has been suggested that Jefferson got the idea of building them after the exposure of his relationship with Sally Hemings. The bedroom shades and the closed blinds of the porticles made it harder to see into his living area when she was there.
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Whether that was the impetus or not, her ability to enter his rooms from the steps of the outside porches leading into his quarters created privacy for them both. Ellen Coolidge’s claim that no female servant could have entered Jefferson’s rooms without being seen by anyone is patently untrue. Hemings never had to enter Jefferson’s rooms from the entrance hallway on the inside of Monticello that visitors and other members of his family traversed. If Hemings, or anyone else, for that matter, used one of the two sets of outside steps leading into his bedroom suite late enough at night, no one in the house would have known she had entered. Only sentinels keeping watch over those two outside entrances twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, could have done that. As far as we know, such sentinels never existed at Monticello.

Changing the physical structure of the most intimate part of his home, however, was not enough to ensure privacy when Jefferson really wanted it. In Paris he had had his hermitage for work and relaxation in solitude, and he needed something similar in the United States. Poplar Forest, in Bedford County, about ninety miles from Monticello, was Jefferson’s second home during his retirement. It was part of the land that he and Martha inherited upon the death of her father. This is where the Jeffersons retreated after his narrow escape from the advance of Tarleton’s troops on Monticello in 1781 and where he began to write
Notes on the State of Virginia
, an obscure place where no one would come looking for him, an aspect that had changed little even into the nineteenth century. Obviously, it was not obscure to the people who lived there, for Poplar Forest was a working plantation with an enslaved labor force that provided steady income for Jefferson’s family. Here he grew tobacco, long after he had switched to wheat at Monticello. Enslaved people traveled back and forth between the two plantations, and families were sometimes split up in the process. A number of teenage boys were taken from Poplar Forest to work in Jefferson’s nail factory at Monticello, and their female counterparts also came there to learn spinning and weaving until he opened a weaving shop at Poplar Forest and they stayed there to learn.
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The remoteness of the place clearly appealed to Jefferson, and amid the travails of his presidency, he began to build a house in what had once been a dense forest of poplar trees. He started in 1806, and the building was finished in 1809, just in time for his retirement. Because few people knew he even had a second home, this was the ideal place to go to escape the throngs at Monticello. It was, indeed, a very Jeffersonian solution, an act of circumvention rather than confrontation. Instead of suggesting, directly or indirectly, that people leave Monticello, he simply decided to leave Monticello to
them
periodically. At first he went alone, but in later years he sometimes took his older grandchildren, who developed a love-hate relationship with the place. They, like he, enjoyed escaping the overabundance of company, but the members of this younger generation were not always happy with the long sojourns.
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Whether Sally Hemings was ever there with him is unknown, because there is virtually no chance that any persons in the Jefferson household would ever have mentioned that in their correspondence.

The house Jefferson built there was, for him, an architectural delight. Later occupants, including his grandson Francis and his wife, Elizabeth, were less impressed. Made of brick, and in his favorite shape, the octagon, the house had a series of inner octagon-shaped chambers surrounding the main living room. With characteristic enthusiasm he pronounced it “the best dwelling house in the state, except that of Monticello.” Given that he built it for privacy, he allowed that Poplar Forest was particularly suited to “the faculties of a private citizen” and was in that way actually better than Monticello.
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Jefferson could never really have been a private citizen, for he had sought to graft himself onto the public mind for nearly two decades. Although he may have done that in the name of furthering his political ideals and preferences for the direction of the new nation, he wanted to make himself the symbol of those ideals and could not easily have been separated from them. Despite that, he took the firm view that public officials should be judged on their actions as public men alone. His private life was not really the public’s business. One understands clearly now why he was so adamant about drawing and maintaining the /files/16/13/66/f161366/public/private distinction, but it was an unrealistic notion then, as it is today. While there should indeed have been limits to how much people wanted to know about him, as a student of history, he understood that the lives of famous men are always subject to scrutiny. This new era of modern American politics, an era he helped usher in, had not changed that fact of human nature. Even he was interested in the personal and sexual lives of other leaders.

The noted Harvard professor George Ticknor, who visited Monticello during Jefferson’s retirement, remembered the former president’s great fondness for a collection of memoirs of what Ticknor called “documents of regal scandal.”
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Ticknor sought to explain Jefferson’s surprising and slightly frivolous (to Ticknor) attachment to the volumes as an example of his well-known hatred for monarchy. That may have been true to an extent, but it sounds very much like an earlier version of reading
Playboy
for the articles. Given what he knew of the world, Jefferson could not reasonably have expected to be able to control the public appetite for information about him. Just as many longed to come to see him even after his public life ended, the interest in his private life continued.

About two years into Jefferson’s retirement, Elijah Fletcher, an educator on his way to his installation as president of New Glasgow Academy, gave an account of his visit to Monticello and Charlottesville. Fletcher, of Vermont, sounding every bit the stereotype of the puritanical New Englander, admitted that he had always been dubious of what he called Jefferson’s “moral conduct”—probably gleaned from what he had read in Federalist newspapers. But, he said, Jefferson’s neighbors in Charlottesville gave him additional cause for concern on that score. They were more than willing to talk about the master of Monticello, and what they knew of life there, including Sally Hemings. Fletcher wrote,

Jefferson’s children were thirteen, eleven, six, and three at the time Fletcher visited, and his commentary reiterates a point that cannot be emphasized enough: the Hemings children’s situation was not in and of itself unique. Many mixed-race children had white fathers who also legally owned them, because interracial sex on plantations was not uncommon. When healthy men and women had sex, they almost invariably had children, given the lack of effective birth control and societal attitudes toward abortion. What made Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings different was that their father was a
famous
white man, and many people cared enough about him to pay attention to what he was doing. Jefferson’s fame, however, did not immunize him and his family from the constitutive attributes of the slave system. The other difference that Fletcher could not have known is that the two eldest children were readying to leave the status that so upset him, and the two youngest would follow in their turn.

Jefferson’s retreat, Poplar Forest, actually played a role in preparing Beverley, Madison, and Eston Hemings for their lives outside of slavery. John Hemings had done work on the house from the very beginning, and all throughout Jefferson’s retirement, Hemings worked on the house’s exterior and interior, doing the woodworking and making the furniture to Jefferson’s specifications. When Beverley and Madison Hemings came of age and became his apprentices, they, and later Eston, all traveled to Poplar Forest to learn carpentry and joining by working on their father’s house. During their teenage years all three were away from the mountain and at Poplar Forest, sometimes for long stretches of time.