The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (95 page)

Martha Randolph, not surprisingly, appears to have been in a state of shock, and the same was probably true for many of those who lived at Monticello. This was not only the death of a man; everyone understood that this was the death of an entire community. Members of Jefferson’s white family were devastated by his loss and their own fears as they contemplated their financial ruin, but, whatever happened, they were still free and white. Even with the humiliation and pain they felt at the loss of status and wealth, they had the basic attributes of privilege that would ensure that they could fall only so far. They had merely lost property; they were not the property that was going to be sold to pay their father’s and grandfather’s debts.

What Sally Hemings and other Hemingses felt as they watched, or imagined if they were not at the funeral, Jefferson being lowered into his grave is unknown. One can safely speculate that there were many varied and complex responses among them. They were of one family, but they bore different relationships to him—ranging from the small children who barely knew him to the woman who had had seven children by him. Fifty-two years before Wormley Hughes dug Jefferson’s grave, his mother, Betty Brown, had come to Monticello as the fifteen-year-old lady’s maid to Martha Jefferson. Fifty-one years before John Hemings crafted Jefferson’s coffin, his mother, Elizabeth Hemings, and all of her children were assembled on the mountain. Their presence there was as long as, and more continuous than, Jefferson’s and his white family’s. That continuity and stability were never of their own making, and they could not have expected to be able to control their own destinies. What was about to happen to the family now could not really have surprised the adults among them, however. The older Hemingses—Betty Brown, Mary (from her home in Charlottesville), and Nancy—were old enough to remember the death that had taken the Hemingses from one home and placed them at their current one, albeit under different circumstances. When John Wayles died, other enslaved families faced separation as Jefferson decided where and how to settle them. That the Hemingses would come to Monticello was likely a foregone conclusion. The specter of imminent bankruptcy brought much more uncertainty about the family’s overall future during these days.

There was something else, of course. Jefferson legally owned the Hemingses, but he and his white daughter and grandchildren were also blood relatives to some of them. He had lived for thirty-eight years with a female member of the family. When Jefferson died, Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings lost their biological father. Sally Hemings lost the man with whom she had cast her lot when she was only a teenager. A situation common enough in their world seems almost unthinkable in ours. Aside from assuming that Sally Hemings was happy that Jefferson had kept his promises and that her children would be free people, we have little to go on in trying to imagine what the now fifty-three-year-old woman felt when Jefferson was gone. Something is perhaps revealed in the items she decided to take with her when she left a Monticello that was soon to be stripped of everything: a pair of Jefferson’s glasses, an inkwell, and one of his shoe buckles, things that she had seen him wear and use and that she knew were important to him. Keeping these items, and eventually giving them to her son as mementos, was a charge by the woman who apparently never spoke to outsiders about Jefferson, to keep alive the memory of her, and her children’s, connection to him. This was, however, only for her family. In the end she was as private about him as he was about her.

It is often said that Americans lack a sense both of tragedy and of irony. Fawn Brodie very rightly called what happened on the mountain in 1826 and its immediate aftermath “The Monticello Tragedy.” It was certainly that, but obviously much more. It was a national tragedy—the natural result of America’s engagement with the institution of slavery, the doctrine of white supremacy, and the nature of human frailty. The relationship of the Hemingses to the tragedy of slavery was unique only because they happened to be owned by one who made himself a public man, but wanted to keep private the world he really lived in with this particular African American enslaved family. There is deep irony in this, too. What Jefferson accomplished for his children, and some of their relatives, was just what he stated could not be accomplished in the nation as a whole.

When freeing Burwell Colbert, Joseph Fossett, John Hemings, and Madison and Eston Hemings, the man who said that he believed it impossible for blacks and whites to live together in the United States, and that people of African origin should be repatriated to another country, asked the legislature to allow these men to remain not just in America but in Virginia. By the time Jefferson died, the American Colonization Society was up and running, and a few slave owners were freeing their slaves and making provision for their transportation to Liberia. They were acting on their deeply felt beliefs. What were Jefferson’s likely true beliefs? The answer depends upon whether one chooses to pay more attention to what people say than to what they actually do. Why not send the men he freed to Liberia? Burwell Colbert’s brother, Brown, would later opt to go there on his own. Jefferson gave the right answer to the question that likely never crossed his mind. The Hemingses should be allowed to remain in Virginia, he said, because that is where their “families and connections” were. That, of course, was the answer to the question why all other African Americans, most of whose ancestors had come to America before or around the same time as the African woman who had borne Elizabeth Hemings, should be allowed to remain in the United States. Many of these people were the children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of white men—just like the men he freed. Their families and connections were in America, too. In truth, Jefferson did not mention race as the basis for the right to a home in America at all. Longstanding family ties and memories created the right. As was often the case, the public rhetorical Jefferson was very different from the down-to-personal-business Jefferson, the one he seldom wanted anyone to see.

The personal Jefferson had dominated the lives of the Hemingses. Their family connections to him, first through his wife and John Wayles and then the connections he created on his own with Sally Hemings, shaped the course of the family’s existence. They also ensured that the world the Hemingses lived in with Jefferson would not be forgotten by their descendants and would remain a subject of fascination to the outside world. That is certainly not what Jefferson and his white family wanted. But, thankfully, they were not masters and mistresses across all space and time, and there is more to the world than law. The power of memory, love, and the strength of family kept alive the Hemingses’ story. That we remember them today is the best and most fitting tribute to the no doubt terrified and unknown African who arrived on the shores of Virginia so many years ago to begin this family’s saga.

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EFFERSON’S DEATH MERELY
set the stage for the final catastrophe. While history has marveled at the near-simultaneous deaths of the Sage of Monticello and the Sage of Quincy, many years later Peter Fossett, who was still a young boy when Jefferson died, put this stunning coincidence into some perspective. He understood the importance of what had happened on July 4, 1826, but noted that “sorrow came not only to the homes of two great men…but to the slaves of Thomas Jefferson.” He was not just talking about the loss of Jefferson. Both old patriots had lived more than their biblical three score and ten, and human beings are born to die. They are not born to endure what Fossett and his family endured six months after the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In January of 1827, Peter Fossett, all of eleven years old, stood alone on an auction block and was sold away from his mother, father, brothers, and sisters. Many of Fossett’s siblings and cousins, some as young as eight years old, suffered the same fate.
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Unlike the first generation of Hemingses who experienced the death of Martha Jefferson, this generation of the family clearly would not survive Jefferson’s death intact. Half a year after his death, the contents of Monticello, along with “130 VALUABLE NEGROES,” were auctioned off. Whatever anxiety the Hemingses felt during this period, they were somewhat better off than other members of the enslaved community, who had no prospect of having anyone in their families freed. Indeed, the fates of the vast majority of those enslaved at Monticello are unknown. Jeff Randolph, the principal executor of Jefferson’s estate, had refused an offer from a man in Georgia to buy a large number of them.
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Sale to the Deep South was a nightmare scenario for most enslaved people, and there was great relief that this did not happen.

White members of the local community had determined the monetary worth of each person enslaved at Monticello. Lucia Stanton has suggested that the prices of some of the slaves were kept low to enable family members to purchase them, which is what occurred in several instances. Daniel Farley, the eldest son of Mary Hemings who had been given to Jefferson’s sister in the late 1780s, bought fifty-six-year-old Peter Hemings, his mother’s half brother, for one dollar. The older man was listed as free in the 1830 census and continued to ply his trade as a tailor for the rest of his life. Jesse Scott, the son-in-law of Mary Hemings, bought her son, Joseph Fossett’s wife, Edith, and their two youngest children, William and Daniel, for just over five hundred dollars. Scott evidently had borrowed money, using some of the property his wife had inherited from her father as collateral, a decision that would have serious consequences decades later. The imperative of the moment was to keep as much of the family together as possible.
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Fossett could not have bid on his wife and children even if he had had the money, because he would not be a free man until July 4, 1827. The truth is that he did not have the money to purchase them all, the cost running in the thousands of dollars. Instead, he made arrangements with as many members of the white community as he could to purchase his older children and hold them until he could buy them himself. John R. Jones, the man who bought Peter Fossett, broke his promise and balked at selling the youngster to his family.
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Burwell Colbert attended the auction that January day as well. In addition to spending thirty-one dollars for a mule, he bought “a carving knife, tea china, and portrait engravings of Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette.” Colbert had numerous children, but because his deceased wife, Critta, had belonged to Martha Randolph, they were not part of Jefferson’s estate. We do not know whether he had yet received his three-hundred-dollar legacy. Given the appraised value of the younger, more productive members of the Hemings family, his bequest would not have been much help. In addition, he did have children of his own to think of. His mother, Betty Brown, was listed as having no value and was in no immediate danger of being moved from her cabin on Monticello. He had no reason to fear for his aunts Critta and Sally, who were not part of the auction either. He may have already known that Francis Wayles Eppes intended to purchase the freedom of Critta Hemings, his nurse for a brief period and the half sister to his mother, so that she could live with her husband, Zachariah Bowles, which he did the same year of the auction.
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Sally Hemings’s situation was convoluted and mysterious, as it had been since her return to America, but one can piece together what happened. Many years later, in 1873, Israel Gillette stated that Jefferson had freed seven slaves, including Sally Hemings and all her children. Of course, he freed only five people in his will. Beverley and Harriet Hemings simply left Monticello as white people with no formal emancipation. Who were the other two? Jefferson evidently made oral bequests of freedom as well. Members of his family told Henry Randall that Jefferson had directed his daughter to free forty-five-year-old Wormley Hughes, if he wanted to be free. For very obvious reasons, no one in the family would report to a historian an oral instruction from Jefferson to free Sally Hemings if she wanted it. Eight years after her father’s death, Martha Randolph directed that two of her father’s slaves, Sally Hemings and Wormley Hughes, and one of her own Randolph slaves, Betsy, the wife of Peter Hemings, be given “their time,” even though all had been living as free people since Jefferson’s death. “Giving time” was a customary way of emancipation that avoided having to make a request to the legislature or county court to allow the enslaved person to remain in the state. Martha explained that she had to free them this way because otherwise they would have been forced to leave Virginia. She knew full well, however, that there was an alternative. She could have asked the legislature, of which her son had been a member, to let Sally Hemings stay in Virginia. This, she was unwilling to do, and her father was apparently unwilling to do it either.
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Whether or not Sally Hemings knew it by the time of Jefferson’s death, the man with whom she had returned to America those thirty-seven years earlier had never been one for martyrdom. He believed, he said, in taking life by the “smooth handle.” Putting the name Sally Hemings in his will, along with their two children, would have been the very opposite of smooth. Indeed, it would have exposed a truth for which, as far as he knew, white America would never forgive him. While the names Madison and Eston Hemings were probably known only to people in Jefferson’s home territory, the name Sally when connected to that of Jefferson was known throughout the country, thanks to Callender and those who followed, like John Quincy Adams. Formally freeing Hemings, while also emancipating two people obviously young enough to be their children, would have told the story of his life over the past thirty-eight years quite well. Instead of remaining a discreetly handled family matter, stories of “Dusky Sally,” “Black Sal,” or the “African Venus” would have come roaring back into the public view.

In truth, it is not at all clear that Jefferson would have thought that formally freeing a fifty-three-year-old woman was the right thing to do, and Virginia law reveals some white Virginians’ thinking on the subject of emancipating older enslaved people. The 1782 Virginia law that allowed private manumissions specifically forbade the freeing of slaves under the age of twenty-one and over the age of forty-five without making express provision for their support.
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The fear, and probably accurate prediction, was that slave owners would work their slaves for their entire productive lives and then free them when they no longer wanted to provide food and shelter for people who were too old to work. These freed/discarded former slaves would then become public charges. Critta Hemings was also older than her sister, Sally, but her source of support was her husband, a man of some means. When he died, Critta Hemings Bowles was given a life estate in their ninety-six-acre farm just north of Charlottesville. Burwell Colbert was only forty-three, and his three-hundred-dollar legacy and life estate in a house and one acre of land would have been enough provision even had he been older. John Hemings was fifty and Joseph Fossett forty-six, both over the statutory limit. But not only were they established tradesmen—Fossett’s blacksmith shop was well known in the community—they, too, had been given places to live and enough land to grow their own food.

What would Jefferson have had to do in order to free Sally Hemings formally? First, he would have had to put her name in his will, and then detail how he was going to make provision for the woman who many knew, and others believed, had been his longtime mistress. Then he would have had to ask the Virginia legislature to allow her to remain in the state. That entailed asking the men in a body that he had sat in as a young man, a body from which he had launched his public career, to give a public endorsement of his nearly forty-year cohabitation with an African American enslaved woman. Given what had initially happened with the lottery, there was no guarantee that the legislature would have granted such a petition. Opposition to the lottery had been framed in terms of morals and concerns about Jefferson’s reputation. For most white Virginians, interracial mixing was not only a legal issue but also a moral one, and stories of Jefferson’s involvement in it had been bandied about for years. In the eyes of many, helping Jefferson make provision for his slave mistress would have raised an issue of even greater concern than lotteries. If the legislature said no, Hemings, at age fifty-three, under law would have to leave Virginia. If the legislature said yes, its members would have to go home and explain their votes to their wives and constituents, who might not have taken kindly to the official endorsement of what they called amalgamation.

Jefferson’s will had both public and private dimensions. It was a public document, with a public effect, but it was also a last statement to Martha Randolph and his legal white grandchildren. It is all but impossible that any but the youngest among them in 1826 would not have known about Jefferson and Hemings. As in all families, knowing and keeping secrets within the family is one thing. There is little doubt that Jefferson and the Randolphs would have seen a public indication that he did indeed have a “shadow family” as a deep betrayal of his legal one. That was never a likely scenario under any circumstances, and certainly not under those in which Jefferson left Martha and her family. One has only to read the spare 1836 will of this woman who had been born into one of the wealthiest families in the country, who had grown up in luxury on two continents, to get a sense of how far she had fallen. At the end of her life, she had almost no material possessions or wealth to pass on, unlike her mother, whose death left Martha’s father a wealthy man.
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The way Sally Hemings departed Monticello is, then, a study in avoidance. It avoided harm to Jefferson’s legacy, it avoided embarrassment and hurt to his white family, it got around the 1782 law’s prohibition of freeing slaves over forty-five without stating how they were to be provided for, and it avoided the operation of the 1806 law that would have required a request for permission for Hemings to remain in the state.

After Jefferson’s death Sally Hemings and her sons went to live in a rented house on Main Street in Charlottesville, not far from her sister Mary. Later her sons would buy their own homes, and she would live with her son Madison. Word spread of her informal emancipation, for she and her sons were listed in the 1830 census as free white people, even though it is inconceivable that the census taker did not know who she was. Her honorary whiteness did not last, however. Three years later, in a special census of 1833, conducted to count the free blacks in the community for purposes of determining which of them wanted to be resettled in Africa, Hemings described herself as a free mulatto who had lived in Charlottesville since 1826. She and her sons declined to return to Africa. They continued to live in downtown Charlottesville, participating in the life of the growing town until her death in the 1830s. Her two eldest children, Beverley and Harriet, kept in contact with their family. But as the years passed, the choices the children of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson made would separate their lines forever. Three would live in the white world, and one would remain in the black world. The end result of their individual decisions show clearly what it has meant to be white in America and what it has meant to be black.
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Monticello was not sold until 1831, when a local citizen, James T. Barclay, bought it and 550 acres for $7,500. The house had been deserted well before then. After her father’s death, Martha Randolph and her youngest children went to live for a time with her daughter Ellen in Boston. Some of the older members of the Hemings family, who had spent their entire lives in one place, clung to the familiar setting of the mountain that was now “theirs” in a way that it had never been before. The place was empty, and no one was making demands upon them. Betty Brown, the first Hemings to arrive at Monticello, was now in her seventies. It was never likely that she thought of going too far away from what had been her home until she absolutely had to. Her son Burwell Colbert, who kept the keys to the house at Monticello, came up periodically to see her, and to clean the house and make sure the yard was in order. Although the dwelling was empty, he felt compelled to perform the tasks that had defined his life for over twenty years. From his home at Shadwell at the base of Monticello, the place of Jefferson’s birth, he ventured out into the world as a painter and glazer, working at the University of Virginia and for people in the community who had known Jefferson. He started a new life at age fifty-one when he married a twenty-year-old local free woman, Elizabeth Battles, and began to raise a second family.
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