The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (9 page)

Advertisements for sales of newly arriving Africans list two names—Wayles and Richard Randolph—and near the end of Wayles’s life, the two were agents for John Powell & Co., an outfit that regularly imported slaves directly from Africa. Even though Virginia was dependent upon slaves, slave traders were generally looked down upon in society. Although southern slave owners went into the market to buy slaves, they wanted to draw a firm distinction between acquiring slaves in that manner and taking them by force from the shores of Africa. Obviously, if there had been no slave trade from Africa, there could have been no sales of Africans in Virginia. Despite that reality, the trade was portrayed as a singularly awful business. Whatever stigma may have attached to slave trading, the commissions that agents could earn on these types of transactions were large enough to overcome any sense of shame, if that was ever really an issue.

Being the agent on consignment arrangements also carried a built-in hazard that was not merely psychological. “Selling agents” like Wayles and Randolph “were expected to guarantee payment from the buyers of slaves consigned.”
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They would be on the hook should anything go wrong and were therefore exposed to potentially catastrophic liability. That very thing happened in the years just before Wayles’s death. He and Richard Randolph secured a loan from Farrell & Jones, a British merchant house with which they had dealings that enabled them to play their designated role in one of these transactions, bringing slaves over on a ship called the
Prince of Wales
. Indeed, the firm had suggested the two men as agents on the deal. When Wayles died in 1773, in the midst of a deep depression in Virginia, none of the money for the slave sales—almost seven thousand pounds sterling—had been sent to John Powell & Co.

Most of the buyers that Wayles and Randolph had lined up had bought the enslaved people—who numbered 400 when the ship set sail, but only 280 by the time it arrived—on credit during a period when economic times were flush. They expected to be able to pay Powell in tobacco. When that market collapsed in the early 1770s, their tobacco became nearly worthless as payment for the slaves, and many farmers did not want to ship their crop when the price was so low. At that point Farrell & Jones stepped in to pay the amount and then sought repayment from Randolph, as the surviving “partner” of Wayles. Randolph’s inability to meet the obligation set in motion a lawsuit that continued long after his death. Farrell & Jones came after both men’s estates for indemnification, eventually obtaining a smaller judgment from Randolph’s. But these contretemps all took place after Wayles’s death. In life Wayles benefited enormously from every aspect of the institution of slavery.
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Wayles’s appointment as Farrell & Jones’ agent in February of 1763 further cemented his place in his adopted society.
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To say that he was an agent does not adequately convey a sense of the role he played in the Virginia society of his time for it suggests an individual arranging deals between eager planters and willing British houses. That was part of it, but an agent had another role, one that may be more suggestive of Wayles’s capacities and personality: he was a debt collector. That was no small task, for debt was a way of life in Virginia. Over the course of Wayles’s career in the colony, planter indebtedness to British merchants grew to such enormous heights that some scholars have suggested it as a chief catalyst for the Virginia colonists’ decision to break away from the British Empire. Whether it was the chief reason or not, the terms of repayment of debts incurred during the pre-Revolutionary period were without question a sore point for the colonists and remained so well after the birth of the United States.

John Wayles was at the center of this commercial maelstrom. It was his job to make sure that planters paid their creditors. How did he do this? Wayles did not just sit at the Forest and issue dunning letters. He went out to meet the planters at their homes and at other venues—catching up with them during court day—to ask them face-to-face, “When are you going to pay Farrell & Jones?” We get a glimpse of Wayles at work in a letter to the firm in which he describes his efforts on their behalf.
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The document is worth considering in some detail for the insight it provides about the character of the man who fathered Elizabeth Hemings’s children and about the world in which he moved.

In this letter Wayles ticks off the names of debtors, one by one, offering sometimes acerbic assessments of their personalities, along with evidence of his implacability in the face of their evasions. Thomas Mann Randolph, whose son would one day marry one of Wayles’s white granddaughters, had “gone to some Springs on the Frontiers to spend the Summer,” thus escaping a Wayles collection visit. Wayles was not letting the matter rest. He went on, “But as he [Randolph] has altered his Port I shall endevor to make Lidderdale pay the Debt.” Of Carter Harrison, “Next month I shall go up Country and make it my business to settle Carter Harrisons Affair as you desire. You are not to be Surprized at his selling his tobacco this Year & disapointing the Ships, because the Man is Acting in Character.”
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The estate of Benjamin Harrison owed money. When a family member was addressed about the debt and promised to “discharge it soon,” Wayles showed benevolence, promising, “I shall Apply to him Differently.” How did he originally plan to apply to him? Another member of the Harrison family proved more problematic: “As to Nat. Harrison, I have wrote more Letters & made more Personal Applications for so small a Sum, then I ever did to any other Gentleman. This family is somehow or other so connected with your other Friends, that, where the debt is not in danger, indulgences are unavoidable, They require more then other People, & therefore on that Score are less desirable correspondents.”
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Wayles goes on and on in this vein. He suggests that one planter, Robert Ruffin, acting as a surety for Archibald Cary’s debt to Farrell & Jones, tricked him into taking some bonds as his payment for the obligation. Wayles took the bonds “without having time in the Hurry of Court to examine the Obligors, the Securitys, & c.” It turned out that the obligors on the bonds were “people…[who] lived on the Borders of Carolina.” He estimated that “it would take 7 years to Collect” on them and then at a reduced rate. The attempt to return the bonds, Wayles complained, “Occationed me much Vexation, besides two Rides up to his House before I could meet with him to Re-deliver the Bonds.” Wayles persisted so tenaciously that Ruffin agreed to take them back only when Wayles promised “not to distress him” further until he had heard something directly from Farrell & Jones. “So much for gratitude,” Wayles said. Later when he tried to get Ruffin to buy some tobacco, he (Ruffin) “had not Spirit to Risque a shilling.” Wayles final assessment of the planter?—“a skin flint in every sence of the word.”
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This was hardly a job for just any man. Imagine his son-in-law Jefferson in that role! Wayles must have been incredibly aggressive and assertive to endure in his position, hounding and no doubt provoking the enmity of some members of a planter class, many of whom were mired deeply in debt. Some of these men were from the oldest and most powerful families in the colony and, as Wayles suggested, were all connected to one another by blood or friendship. They were inclined to help one another out against their common antagonists, Wayles and people like him. They would not have seen Wayles as their kind.

Take the example of Richard Hanson as a comparison. After the American Revolution, Hanson acted as a Farrell & Jones postwar “John Wayles,” with responsibility for collecting Virginia’s prewar debts to the firm. Hanson, an old business partner of Wayles’s, was a much reviled figure. Granted, the new Americans may have seen Hanson as a symbol of the country from which they had just won independence. And here he came reminding them that that was not the end of the story. Fair or not, debt collectors, in any era, seldom engender warm feelings. Jefferson said that Hanson’s form “haunted [him] nightly.”
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Wayles must have haunted a few planters’ dreams in his time, too.

Wayles’s letter hinted at one point that he knew that others looked down on the way he spent his time. He wrote of the arrival of “Mr. John Morton Jerdon [Jordan] & his very Pretty wife” into the colony. Jordan was a partner in Jordan and Maxwell, a tobacco house in England. After noting that Jordan’s “retinue is little inferior to any Lord’s,” Wayles suggested that Jordan was above haranguing individuals to pay their debts. “I believe that he will not Medle with Baker [a local banker] as he had said he should not dirty his fingers with trade. However
that will not throw me off my Guard
. Baker is a Capital Object with me & takes up much of my Attention” (emphasis added).
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Strictly speaking, Jordan was involved in trade, too, but in his mind (at least as presented by Wayles) at a different, “higher,” “cleaner” level. Wayles himself was heavily involved in trade—the tobacco trade and the African slave trade, as dirty a one as ever existed. And he proudly differentiates himself from Jordan as a man without a “retinue,” let alone a “Lord’s” retinue, saying in effect, “Unlike Jordan, I will ride up to the man’s house myself and get the job done. Whatever it takes, I will do.”

The record shows that this was the way Wayles approached his business operations. He would do whatever it took. Philip Ludwell must have spotted this capacity in the young man from Lancaster. This is not to say that he would have done anything illegal, but legality aside, one has to have great fortitude to build wealth, as opposed to inheriting it or marrying into it. It helps to be given a stake by a patron, but maintaining one’s position and building on it takes effort and commitment. And John Wayles knew how to spot opportunities for building wealth, and he seems never to have hesitated. We see this in another of Wayles’s business ventures. Above all else, land was a valued commodity in the colony. The chance to own property was what had impelled thousands of immigrants across the Atlantic to face death and all sorts of hardships. Wayles pursued land as tenaciously and cleverly as he did Farrell & Jones’s debtors. The Virginia Land Patent Books from the 1740s and 1750s show how Wayles operated in this arena. He worked Virginia’s land patent system to great advantage, amassing thousands of acres over the course of about ten years.

To promote the economic progress of the colony, the crown allowed settlers to purchase land in fifty-acre segments, upon payment of quitrents and with a requirement that the land be cultivated. If the purchaser failed to fulfill these obligations, others who were interested in the land could file suit and take the property. That is how John Wayles acquired much of his land. In the first such transaction Wayles obtained “500 acs” (acres) in Cumberland on “Angola Cr.” (Creek) after the named patent holders “failed to pay quitrents and cultivate” the property. “John Wayles hath made humble suit and hath obtained a G. [grant] of the same.” That process was repeated for 1,000 acres, again in Cumberland, along “Great Guinea & Angola” Creeks, another 245 acres in the same area, and 400 acres on the “N.side of the Appomattox” River. In one transaction Wayles consolidated several holdings from patent challenges for a total of 3,713 acres.
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In another he and seven others were given right to “sixty-four thousand acres on the waters of the New River in Augusta below the mouth of the Bearskin Fork” if they had it surveyed and paid a set amount within three years. In sum, Wayles possessed sufficient ambition and energy to have had his hand in almost every major form of wealth building available in Virginia.

For all of his wealth and participation in economic activities in the Williamsburg area, Wayles seems not to have made a lasting mark on the place. He was there, but not there, in some very telling ways. Informal sketches of life in Williamsburg during his time that discuss the leading lights of the town fail to mention him. Except in connection to his very famous son-in-law, his name seldom appears in scholarly histories of that time either. Granted, he shared the stage with some very impressive people: George Wythe, mentor to Thomas Jefferson, future signer of the Declaration of Independence and holder of the first professorship of law at the College of William and Mary; Patrick Henry, the famous orator and revolutionary; as well as others whose “great family” connections ensured that they would get talked about whether they were truly worth talking about or not. Still, Wayles’s few appearances in the historical record of his day suggest that, despite his financial success and his connections to wealthy patrons, he was not considered a full-fledged member of the leadership class.

There are other probable reasons for Wayles’s absence from the collective memories of his home territory. First, he had no legitimate sons to carry on his name and business operations. His money, land, slaves, and, most disastrously, his debts would be taken over by the men who married his daughters. Wayles effectively disappeared into a Skipwith, an Eppes, and a Jefferson, although for a time his black and white descendants kept his name alive in the names of their children. In addition to his service as a debt collector, the way he conducted himself as a lawyer may account for his absence from the record. In the eighteenth century, as always, there was some ambiguity about lawyers’ place in society. People called upon and admired lawyers when they needed them, but feared and slightly loathed them when they did not. Rightly or wrongly, some practitioners were seen as more inherently respectable than others. There is a hint of this in Jefferson’s description of Wayles: he was successful not because of his intellectual abilities and approach to law but because he was an energetic, in today’s parlance, “rainmaker.” Of all the codas to place on one’s father-in-law’s career, why that one? It is possible that Wayles was the victim of snobbery because of his lower-class origins and because he was too obviously a striver, more concerned with making money than with seeing law as just another eighteenth-century gentleman’s field of scholarly knowledge supplemented by payments.